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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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What Was the Lisp Machine?

09 Aug 2025 - 12 Aug 2025
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    • Remembrance of programming environments past.
    • The Lisp Machine was developed at the MIT AI Lab and later commercialized by Symbolics, LMI, and Texas Instruments. It was well-loved but a commercial failure, and today is dead although various retrocomputing efforts exist. It was a computer system build from the ground up by hackers and as a result provided a level of power and flexibility that (rather suprisingly) hasn't really been matched in newer systems. It's kind of shameful that its wonderful features can't be found in present-day environments.

    • What does Clojure need to be more LispM like?

    • CLOS
    • Better error handling (in-context repl, dynamic restarts, etc)
    • Dynamic Windows (object-based REPL)
    • Some kind of standard persistent store
    • Aside from error handling, these all seem pretty doable.