Why we need Lisp machines
Meh the problem is "Which Lisp?"  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't interoperate well.  They haven't built up a big ecosystem of reusable code.<p>Whereas Python, JavaScript, R, C, C++, and Rust programmers can reuse each others' 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'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'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://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html</a><p><i>> 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'll definitely update it if there's something  I'm missing.<p>I would say the design of Unix is "rotting", but the answer is to IMPROVE Unix.  Not dream of clean slate designs that will never be deployed.  Plus this post doesn'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's not a good idea.