* Posts by masinter

2 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Apr 2023

Revival of Medley/Interlisp: Elegant weapon for a more civilized age sharpened up again

masinter

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* Lisp parentheses are less annoying when you use Medley's SEdit structure editor and managed files.

* It's a different style of development -- you don't start with a text editor typing in your program, you grow software incrementally. You don't have to have your program completed before you can start running it. There are files, but the files are more like backup/checkpoint than source truth.

* The "sweet spot" for the system was exploratory programming, incremental development, rapid prototyping, for researchers in AI, GUIs, linguistics, etc. The users weren't primarily concerned with software engineering, modularity, security, at least until much later.

* 'first' and 'rest' are part of Common Lisp, and mean the same thing as CAR and CDR.In Interlisp since the early 70's, you can define a "record" format and hide all of those calls.

* WebAssembly: there's a port , but some details need to be worked out, like what to do for a file system. Way back when, files lived on file servers, and we're looking at that as a possible (retro) architecture for Medley in the browser.

We're far from done. We're doing this for fun.

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https://larrymasinter.net https://interlisp.org

Version 100 of the MIT Lisp Machine software recovered

masinter

Lisp Machine revival

For another Lisp machine revival, check out the work we're doing to revive Interlisp at https://Interlisp.org