SymbolicsTalk28June2012
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it to anyone curious about Lisp machines, since it comes from someone who worked at Symbolics.
What it is
Kalman Reti, one of the last Symbolics developers, gives a roughly hour-long talk on Symbolics Lisp machines. It covers the machines and their environment from an insider's perspective.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2021 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends rml · 2021-04 · on “What have we lost? [video]”
If you are into Lisp Machines, this talk on Symbolics by Kalman Reti (who worked there) is worth watching (1h): [this video] If you only have 15 minutes, he gives another demo here: [LINK] He has another video where he does some actual hacking (smooth scrolling of sheet music for display while playing an instrument): [LINK]
Cites pjmlp · 2021-01 · on “Why I still Lisp”
Common Lisp invented the REPL, Clojure only provides a subset of it. Have a look at, "The Interlisp Programming Environment", [LINK] Or online demos like [this video] for Symbolics. Ultimately you can try the community versions of Allegro and LispWorks. [LINK] [LINK]
Cites Phiwise_ · 2024-03 · on “Symbolics Sunstone Development Plan (1987) [pdf]”
>In addition: two months to a compiler? Four to a complete chip? All from a team under 15 ppl? "Because of [Symbolics' automated design] methodology, we were able to do five different revs of the chip on four different technologies, which was pretty amazing [for the time]. ... We took about 10 to 12 man-years to do the Ivory chip, and the only comparable chip contemporaneous to that was the MicroVAX at DEC; I knew some people who worked on that, and their estimate was that it was 70 to 80 man-years to do the MicroVAX. That in a nutshell is the reason that the Symbolics lisp machine was great." -Kalman Reti (2012) [this video] Non-blub work environments bring sone fantasy-tier goals down to just w