As you all know by now, I’m a fan of the Lisp Machine concept. Like the majority of people, I never had the opportunity to work on an actual Lisp Machine—they were horrendously expensive and they haven’t been produced in years. They were never commercially successful but nevertheless enjoy an almost mythical reputation.
Today, the best most people can do is Emacs. That’s pretty good, actually, but Emacs can’t begin to match the power of the Lisp Machine operating environment. Still, most of us have come to peace with the idea of Emacs as the modern Lisp Machine.
Most of us but not all. For example, Fulton, over at Fulton’s Ramblings, believes that not only were Lisp Machines were the right thing but that their time is coming again. He notes that while Unix ran on relatively modest hardware, Lisp Machines required significant hardware including lots of memory and a frame buffer. All that was expensive back then and by the time the prices came down, Unix was well established and had captured the market and mind share.
Fulton believes that Unix has a myriad of problems and that those problems will lead to a resurgence of the Lisp Machine era. As much as I love the idea Lisp Machines, I don’t think this is going to happen. Sure, Unix has grown increasingly complex but that’s because it’s addressing increasingly complex problems. Lisp Machines didn’t have to worry about (hideously complex) things like Web Browsers, or even the ubiquitous Web.
Were Lisp Machines to reemerge, they would undoubtedly undergo the same complexification that Unix has suffered. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a modern Lisp Machine but, really, it’s a nerd dream that would almost certainly be unable to gain popular acceptance. After all, we can’t even convince most nerds to learn Lisp.
Even if the nerd market were large enough, what would we use them for? Presumably software development would be the main use but writing software for different Unix platforms is already difficult enough. Imagine how hard it would be if we were developing it on a completely different system.
I’m doubtful that I’ll see the second coming of Lisp Machines but I do have Emacs which is a pretty good approximation and an excellent compromise given the market and technical realities.