What is complete bullshit? I'm told the Lisp machines were awesome but I've never had the opportunity to use one. I was only starting programming on an Amiga 500 around 89-90 in BASIC. I wouldn't even know what Lisp was until 2007-2008.
Or is my terribly lazy and misinformed history of the AI winter and the rise of inexpensive Unix mainframes inaccurate as to the reason why Lisp suddenly dropped out of vogue? I've only read accounts of it online. If you have a link to a better source I'd be happy to read it. :)
You wrote: '>tldr; there were once only commercial implementations of Common Lisp that cost far too much and delivered little. Because money.
Which is complete bullshit.'
that's bullshit. Complete bullshit.
Lisp Machines were programmed in ZetaLisp (aka Lisp Machine Lisp) and Interlisp. Not Common Lisp. Common Lisp appeared later on Lisp Machines as an additional Lisp dialect and software was than gradually moved to Common Lisp.
The first version of Common Lisp was initially designed between 1982 and 1984. The defining book was published in 1984.
CMUCL, a free Common Lisp, appeared early. CMUCL was many years forked into SBCL, but CMUCL is still available today. KCL, which then was patched into AKCL, ... Which today is ECl, MKCL, GCL! ... appeared early. CLISP, a free implementation in C, appeared early.
A bunch of mid-priced Common Lisps was available for Windows and Macs.
The commercial ones for Unix were Allegro CL, Lucid CL and LispWorks. They were slightly more expensive and great.
There was always a choice of various Common Lisp implementations...
'Unix mainframes?' What is a Unix mainframe? Unix ran on various types of machines, but there was no rise of a Unix mainframes.
Common Lisp was early available with Lisp. Every major university had a site license for a commercial Common Lisp. I used CL on a SUN cluster. Steve Jobs shipped his first NeXT machine with Allegro CL included.
Common Lisp was never bound to Lisp Machines or only on Lisp Machines. Far from it. The whole idea of Common Lisp was to have the language available on a wide variety of machines: personal workstations, PCs, Unix systems, IBM Mainframes and supercomputers like the Cray.
You're right. I don't know where my head was at when I made that comment. I was totally wrong and I apologize the the parent and everyone else who came across it.
Maybe I was struggling to recall Dan Wienreb's post[0] on the failure of Symbolics and somehow confusing that with other things and not making much sense.
Or is my terribly lazy and misinformed history of the AI winter and the rise of inexpensive Unix mainframes inaccurate as to the reason why Lisp suddenly dropped out of vogue? I've only read accounts of it online. If you have a link to a better source I'd be happy to read it. :)