The lost cause of the Lisp machines

Summary

I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will. History Symbolics went bankrupt in early 1993. In the way of these things various remnants of the company lingered on for, in this case, decades. But 1983 was when the Lisp Machines died. The death was not unexpected: by the time I started using mainstream Lisps in 19891 everyone knew that special hardware for Lisp was a dead idea. The common idea was that the arrival of RISC machines had killed it, but in fact machines like the Sun 3/260 in its ‘AI’ configuration2 were already hammering nails in its coffin. In 1987 I read a report showing the Lisp performance of an early RISC machine, using Kyoto Common Lisp, not a famously fast implementation of CL, beating a Symbolics on the Gabriel benchmarks [PDF link]. 1993 is 32 years ago. The Symbolics 3600, probably the first Lisp machine that sold in more than tiny numbers, was introduced in 1983, ten years earlier. People who used Lisp machines other than as historical artefacts are old today3. Lisp machines were both widely available and offered the best performance for Lisp for a period of about five years which ended nearly forty years ago. They were probably never competitive in terms of performance for the money. It is time, and long past time, to let them go. But still the romantics — some of them even old enough to remember the Lisp machines — repeat their myths. ‘It was the development environment’ No, it wasn’t. The development environments offered by both families of Lisp machines were seriously cool, at least for the 1980s. I mean, they really were very cool indeed. Some of the ways they were cool matter today, but some don’t. For instance in the 1980s and early 1990s Lisp images were very large compared to available memory, and machines were also extremely slow in general. So good Lisp development environents did a lot of work to hide this slowness, and in general making sure you only very seldom had ...