Why we need Lisp machines
Meh the problem is &quot;Which Lisp?&quot;  There are dozens of incompatible Lisps.  Even this site is written in a Lisp dialect written by its author (Arc).<p>In fact I conjecture that this is the reason Unix is more popular than Lisp -- because Lisps don&#x27;t interoperate well.  They haven&#x27;t built up a big ecosystem of reusable code.<p>Whereas Python, JavaScript, R, C, C++, and Rust programmers can reuse each others&#x27; code via Unix-style coarse-grained composition.  (Not just pipes -- think about a web server running behind nginx, or git reusing SSH and HTTP as transports.)<p>You can also use link time composition.  It takes some work but it&#x27;s better than rewriting your Common Lisp code from scratch in Clojure.<p>-----<p>Honest question: how do you communicate between two Lisp processes on two different machines?  I know Clojure has EDN (which is sort of like JSON : JavaScript), but I haven&#x27;t heard of the solutions for other Lisps.<p>I wrote about this problem here: <i>A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture</i> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oilshell.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;backlog-arch.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oilshell.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;backlog-arch.html</a><p><i>&gt; The lowest common denominator between a Common Lisp, Clojure, and Racket program is a Bourne shell script (and eventually an Oil script).</i><p>I&#x27;ll definitely update it if there&#x27;s something  I&#x27;m missing.<p>I would say the design of Unix is &quot;rotting&quot;, but the answer is to IMPROVE Unix.  Not dream of clean slate designs that will never be deployed.  Plus this post doesn&#x27;t actually propose anything.  If you actually start trying to build your Lisp machine, I believe you will run into dozens of reasons why it&#x27;s not a good idea.