Why we need Lisp machines
&gt; This feels like a whole bunch of misunderstandings about what I&#x27;m saying ... Almost everything here was directly addressed in the article.<p>I would definitely appreciate you pointing out exactly where the misunderstandings are! (also, ironically, most of the points that you make here were already addressed in <i>my</i> comment, including refutations of some of the ideas in your articles)<p>&gt; JSON is mentioned in the post as A narrow waist, not THE narrow waist (of an operating system or of the Internet). I also mention CSV and HTML as &quot;on the same level&quot;.<p>I saw that JSON was described as <i>a</i> narrow waist; however, the specific context of my question was about the use of those technologies applied to Lisps - if you believed that those were narrow waists, then you wouldn&#x27;t have written both of the following:<p>&gt; The lowest common denominator between a Common Lisp, Clojure, and Racket program is a Bourne shell script (and eventually an Oil script).<p>&gt; What Is a Narrow Waist? [...] Small, simple mechanisms like the Internet Protocol, UTF-8, and JSON.<p>That is, there&#x27;s an inconsistency between two statements both made by you, not a misunderstanding on my part.<p>&gt; JSON, CSV, and HTML are all built on top of plain text. You can store them in source control and you can use grep on them, and you can build more specialized tools for them (which has been done multile times.)<p>Yes, and as I said in my initial post, that&#x27;s both incidental and irrelevant. You missed or ignored several paragraphs of my comment you&#x27;re responding to (starting with &quot;Your article says&quot;). I&#x27;ll re-state for the sake of concision: the fact that those technologies are built on top of plain text does <i>not</i> mean that plain text is a narrow waist! All of those formats require the <i>same level of parsing effort</i> as they would as a byte-oriented protocol that didn&#x27;t adhere to the subset of &quot;plain text&quot;. This was, again, already addressed in my comment.<p>&gt; See the threads linked in the posts -- a variant of this same argument came up.<p>You say &quot;the posts&quot; but there are at <i>least</i> four different &quot;zones&quot; that you could be referring to (the other posts on the Lisp machine article, links in your blog posts, or the Reddit or HN posts on your blog posts), and dozens-to-hundreds of individual links&#x2F;comments in each of those &quot;zones&quot;. &quot;the posts&quot; means nothing - please either link to a specific web page (or part of it, if it&#x27;s long), or re-state the argument in your own words, so I can see what your argument <i>is</i>.<p>&gt; This is very related to the idea of building Lisp into hardware, which I view as a bad idea.<p>I&#x27;m not defending that idea - I also thing it&#x27;s a bad idea! I&#x27;m arguing against the specific idea of &quot;text&quot; being a &quot;narrow waist&quot;.<p>&gt; The article is analyzing why empirically Unix, the web, and the Internet have worked in multiple respects<p>You say this, but I can find zero evidence in either of your posts to support the assertion that <i>the success of those things is a direct result of their use of plain text as a narrow waist</i>. Thing like HTML don&#x27;t count, because again, the fact that HTML builds on top of plain text is incidental and irrelevant.<p>&gt; These are obviously successful systems<p>...and there are dozens of reason why a system can be successful, <i>many of them social&#x2F;cultural and not technical</i>. Why is Windows so popular? Gmail? C++? Perl? SQL? Java? x86? DVD&#x2F;Bluray? JavaScript? Are you going to tell me that the popularity of <i>all</i> of these systems are mainly due to technical reasons, and not business, social, cultural, and incidental ones?<p>In the specific case of Java, I can tell you that the main reason for its success was because Sun bribed universities to teach their CS courses in Java in exchange for free Sun workstations, and then the students went out and spread Java around. This is a perfect counterexample to the <i>extremely</i> naive idea that &quot;technical superiority leads to market dominance&quot;, and there are dozens more out there.<p>Actually, given that we&#x27;re on HN, <i>any</i> successful startup founder will tell you that <i>technical superiority will not make your company successful</i> (and of course we can then translate that to success in the open-source world).<p>&gt; I think it is pretty crazy to have the opinion that because it makes you parse things that a design that tries to eliminate parsing much be better along many&#x2F;all dimensions!<p>Then I&#x27;m going to say that I think that it is pretty crazy to have the opinion that a system that requires you to completely unnecessarily add serialization and deserialization <i>for virtually no benefit whatsoever</i> (and many significant drawbacks) is somehow better overall than a system that...doesn&#x27;t.<p>&gt; These kinds of (IMO naive) arguments are exactly why I wrote the last 2 posts.<p>I&#x27;m coming up with concrete counterarguments to every single point that you concretely state. Calling them &quot;naive&quot; instead of addressing their content is...not an indicator of sound reasoning, to say the least.<p>&gt; They were popular and highly commented upon, and most people got it, or at least appreciated the tradeoffs I highlighted.<p>And, of course, none of those things are indicators of sound reasoning, either - appeal to authority and popularity fallacies, and all that.<p>&gt; So I don&#x27;t need to convince everybody<p>Well, unless you make concrete and valid arguments, I won&#x27;t be convinced - although you can always find people who are convinced without those...<p>&gt; as I said in the intro to the post, the more important task is to build something that embodies these ideas.<p>I <i>am</i> building things that embody these ideas. They&#x27;re likely never going to be open-source, though, so I&#x27;m not surprised if you don&#x27;t believe me.<p>&gt; I look forward to your code and blog posts<p>The idea that blog posts are somehow more authoritative or substantial than any kind of writing is...something, for sure.<p>Unless you&#x27;re saying that a design paradigm isn&#x27;t good unless it&#x27;s implemented in software, in which case that&#x27;s clearly false, given the number of completely terrible design paradigm that have been used to design &quot;working&quot; software.