Why we need Lisp machines
I&#x27;m as big of a Lisp fan as can be. I&#x27;m a proud owner of Symbolics and TI hardware: a MicroExplorer, a MacIvory, two 3650, and two 3620. Not to mention an AlphaServer running OpenGenera.<p>Today, we have computers that run Lisp orders of magnitude faster than any of those Lisp machines. And we have about 3–4 orders of magnitude more memory with 64-bits of integer and floating point goodness. And Lisp is touted to have remained one of the most powerful programming languages (I think it&#x27;s true, but don&#x27;t read into it too much).<p>Yet, it appears the median and mean Lisp programmer is producing Yet Another (TM) test framework, anaphoric macro library, utility library, syntactic quirk, or half-baked binding library to scratch an itch. Our Lisp programming environments are less than what they were in the 80s because everybody feels the current situation with SLIME and Emacs is good enough.<p>We don&#x27;t &quot;need&quot; Lisp machines. We &quot;need&quot; Lisp software. What made a Lisp machines extraordinary wasn&#x27;t the hardware, it was the software. Nothing today is impeding one from writing such software, except time, energy, interest, willpower, and&#x2F;or money.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, there are some Lisp programmers today developing superlative libraries and applications [1], but the Lisp population is thin on them. I&#x27;d guess that the number of publicly known, interesting (by some metric), and <i>maintained</i> applications or libraries that have sprung up in the past decade probably fits on one side of a 3&quot;x5&quot; index card. [2]<p>Though I won&#x27;t accuse the article&#x27;s author of such, sometimes, I find, in a strange way, that pining for the Lisp machines of yore is actually a sort of mental gymnastic to absolve one for not having written anything interesting in Lisp, and to excuse one from ever being able to do so.<p>[1] Just to cherry-pick a recent example, <i>Kandria</i> is a neat platformer developed entirely in Common Lisp by an indie game studio, with a demo shipping on Steam: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;1261430&#x2F;Kandria&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;1261430&#x2F;Kandria&#x2F;</a><p>[2] This doesn&#x27;t mean there aren&#x27;t enough foundational libraries, or &quot;batteries&quot;, in Lisp. Though imperfect, this is by and large not an issue in 2022.