On 2010/03/06, at 03:34 , John Zabroski wrote:
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 3:19 PM, Kurt Stephens <k...@kurtstephens.com>
wrote:
Alejandro F. Reimondo wrote:
John,
>Where else should I look?
In my opinion what is "missing" in the languages
formulations is sustainability of the system. [*]
In case of formula/abstract based declaration of systems
all alternatives make people put on the idea(L) side
and not in the system itself (the natural side).
Smalltalk is the only alternative of sustainable system
development used commertially today.
Smalltalk did not spawn an entire industry of specialized hardware
like Lisp. However Lisp hardware is a collector's item now. :)
There are plenty of commercial projects using Common Lisp today and
from what I can tell, there has been renewed, grassroots interest in
Lisp (CL and Scheme) over the last 5 years. Smalltalk is not the
only alternative. Both have ANSI standard specifications.
KAS
Have you read the Lisp Lore [1] book for a history of Lisp machines?
I am personally just 25 years old, and have been trying to buy a
Symbolics Genera machine on eBay for a year now, and just can't get
one at a reasonable price.
Believe me, these are reasonable prices! (And don't forget to add the
shipping and handling cost, these are heavy machines).
The reason why they're so expensive is because so few of them have
been made. You know, demand and offer...
For a time it was possible to buy instead alpha hardware and the
Genera VM running on alpha. Unfortunately, since the symbolics.com
domain has been sold to a blogger, I don't know where you could obtain
it from.
However, what I read in [1] is that the systems inherently were
unstable in terms of dynamic reconfiguration (Ale's main point about
openness). I personally believe any system should inherently
support superstabilization in its core. Superstabilization is
generalization of Dijkstra's definition of system stability.
It was definitely possible to break it, but then you can also break
your linux kernel and try to reboot. Or just write to /proc/kmem as
root...
However, I've been told that they had as good uptimes as unix systems
if not better, and that their network services weren't as susceptible
to external attack as on unix systems.
If necessary. I can quote pages from this book that mentions the
instability of reconfiguring the system.
[1] LISP Lore: A Guide to Programming the LISP Machine by H.
Bromley, Richard Lamson ISBN-13: 978-0898382280
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com
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