Why did Lisp machines fade into obscurity?

Why did Lisp machines fade into obscurity?

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because they were obscure

normies an brainlets

Because Lisp is shit.

It was more convenient for places to use UNIX computers instead.
This is the "Worse is Better" approach described in "UNIX Haters", if you want more information.

because the intel 386 CPU came out and all of a sudden you could run Lisp on a $400 PC instead of having to buy a $40,000 Lisp Machine

The big problem with "worse is better" is that worse isn't really better. It's only convenient in the short term, but using it for anything longer than that leads to the brain damage we are experiencing today.

I agree is both of these

Imagine if our forbearers had taken the time to develop better compilers and specialized hardware to interface with lisp code. What a world we might be living in now

Depends on the point of view. "Worse is better" is true for reproduction. UNIX ran on every cheap minicomputer while Lisp Machines had so much integration between hardware and software it was useless to try porting the OS

They were cool as fuck, but were obsolete after general purpose computers became common.

indeed
now we're dug deep into a hole molded around C and UNIX that no one is willing to try and get us out of

thats not how it works
it's not like people just picked a direction at random
technology develops along the optimal path
lisp machines are not the optimal path

Well it's getting to where the top layers of software are so far removed from the bottom that I don't think it will be long before you can reasonably create an OS without C that runs enough applications for a normal end-user. I guess the real fucker right now is web browsers

You also have to take into account the hardware, which is the part that brings the whole project down
I don't think it's possible to get out of it anymore

If I recall it was because of a parent war wit MIT and symbolic labs or something like that and then we're to busy fighting each other they missed the larger picture.
Also there's more money in number crunching (i.e. Fortran) compared to symbolic computing. Especially after they failed to deliver in AI.

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I still dont get the point of functional/procedurial, act/react, lisp, etc ideas in prog.
Is there any book or article to get this?

I disagree with your assumption that there is a single optimal path. Technology does develop according to the maximization of certain optimal traits, but those decisions are based on the situation we find ourselves in, and the things we value. I was suggesting an alternate reality where our collective values were different, and people preferred the optimal traits of lisp machines over the optimal traits of Unix

Have you read SICP?

Well they originally did not have GC implemented so you had to restart them when memory was full. When they implemented it, it was so slow. No idea if they ever fixed that issue.

There weren't good enough resources for it's proper usage at the time. It'll come back around though now that we have better technology, just like parallel programming and machine learning has.

> 386 came out
> somehow worth only $400
???????

Slow as shit at a time when a bit of performance boost was the difference between working and not working.