[Openmcl-devel] talk on CCL

Sun Jan 5 15:02:34 PST 2020

I did my Masters thesis on CCL on a Mac Plus in 1985, and (some of) my Ph.D. work on a Mac II in 1991.

On Jan 5, 2020, at 9:31 AM, Dan Corkill <corkill at cs.umass.edu> wrote:

> That’s my recollection as well...  Macs and PCs were hobbyist Lisp tools at the time.
> 
>> On Jan 5, 2020, at 12:20 PM, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info> wrote:
>> 
>> In my experience, thinking back to the 90s, it was not Macs or other stock PCs that killed the lisp machines: it was a combination of Lucid Common Lisp (and perhaps to a lesser extent, Allegro), and Sun workstations on the competitive front, and the first big AI Winter on the demand front.
>> 
>> There was a AAAI Conference in Seattle in 1987 where there was a huge blowout, and the winter came rushing in quite soon after that.  There was a huge contrast between the lavishness of AAAI-87, and the following conferences.
>> 
>>> On 4 Jan 2020, at 15:57, Craig Lanning wrote:
>>> 
>>> As someone that has used a Lisp Machine for over two decades and owns
>>> one (XL1201) even now, I would say that MBA's had more to do with the
>>> death of the Lisp Machine (specifically Symbolics as a company) than
>>> any specific Common Lisp implementation. Before you can talk about
>>> replacing LispM's you need to know what the hardware was capable of
>>> doing. A Mac is not even close. I developed a system on a Symbolics
>>> 3620 and then deployed that 3620 to the customer site. It was used by
>>> more than just our direct customer. I would not have attempted to
>>> deploy a Mac to do that job.
>>> 
>>> Symbolics had an interactive interface builder on their Lisp Machines
>>> for building Dynamic Windows interfaces. The builder application was
>>> called Frame Up.
>>> 
>>> Craig Lanning
>>> 
>>> P.S. I have actually find Clozure CL to be slower than even SBCL.
>>> Clozure CL is slower because it spends most of its time in the GC.
>>> 
>>>> On Sun, 2018-10-21 at 21:31 -0700, Chris Hanson wrote:
>>>> As someone who’s studied their history, I seriously think that
>>>> CCL/MCL is an under-acknowledged participant in the death of Lisp
>>>> Machines: When you could use a Macintosh for development nearly as
>>>> effectively as a Lisp Machine for barely a tenth the cost (or even
>>>> less), and deploy on Macintosh as well, why spend all that money on
>>>> specialized hardware? Especially since by the 1990s the Lisp Machines
>>>> were falling far behind on performance.
>>>> 
>>>> -- Chris
>>>> 
>>>>> On Oct 19, 2018, at 8:55 AM, Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> " an intrepid band of hackers formed a little company called Coral
>>>>> Software. And Coral Common Lisp was their product that they managed
>>>>> to put together, and it came out in 1987, and … they had a Common
>>>>> Lisp (it didn’t have CLOS, so it was CLTL1), [which] ran on a 1MB
>>>>> Macintosh Plus, this incredibly weak hardware. So that was a real
>>>>> accomplishment.”
>>>>> 
>>>>> Not only did they have a CL that ran on a 1MB Mac Plus, it had an
>>>>> IDE!  And not only did it have an IDE, it had one of the best IDEs
>>>>> ever.  You can still run it on emulators today, and it is still
>>>>> usable — even competitive — today.  It had an interactive interface
>>>>> builder that is still to this day superior to anything I have seen
>>>>> anywhere.  I still miss it.  (I used the original CCL to do my
>>>>> masters thesis back in 1987 and it spoiled me on IDEs for
>>>>> life.  I’ve been a grumpy old man ever since.)
>>>>> 
>>>>> I would rank the original CCL as a technical achievement on a par
>>>>> with the Macintosh itself.
>>>>> 
>>>>> rg
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Oct 18, 2018, at 5:12 PM, R. Matthew Emerson <rme at acm.org>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> I was invited to give a talk at this year’s European Lisp
>>>>>> Symposium in Marbella, Spain.  It was a great conference.  I
>>>>>> highly recommend that you try to attend next the next one if you
>>>>>> possibly can.  It will be in Genoa, Italy.  See
>>>>>> https://european-lisp-symposium.org.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Anyway, I prepared a web site that contains a video of the talk
>>>>>> and also a written transcript with slides included in the text in
>>>>>> the appropriate places.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> The link is http://thisoldlisp.com/talks/els-2018/
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> It’s not really very technical in nature (it’s meant to be
>>>>>> entertaining and encouraging), but maybe some of you would enjoy
>>>>>> it.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
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>>>>> 
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