• Amicese
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    21 year ago

    Anyway, the LISP REPL gives a lot of agency to the user.

    In the early 60s, operating systems on LISP machines used a LISP REPL; the interface gave the user a lot of agency in their usage of the machine, which you rarely see in modern operating systems. However, LISP machines were very expensive and so this necessitated the access being limited to the state.

    A common pattern that formed as a result of hardware, LISP was used on powerful systems, while FORTRAN was used elsewhere.

    Today, the most used modern operating systems are built to take that agency away from the worker…

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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      11 year ago

      I definitely agree that we’ve regressed in many ways since the days of LISP machines and Smalltalk. You’re absolutely correct that the cost of LISP machines was a big factor. Very few people got to experience these kinds of interactive environments, while most people got experience on consumer grade hardware that was very limited. Languages like Fortran and C made sense in this context because you wanted to have a very thin level over machine code to get the most out of the hardware. A whole generation of programmers got trained in this environment and went to teach new generations. Now, we’re finally rediscovering these things.