R
Rainer Joswig
lispm.de · Personal blog · on HN since 2014
Rainer Joswig writes about Lisp, Symbolics Lisp Machines, Genera, Dylan, and the Lisp-based Newton OS, and hosts archival documents.
What HN saysHN links it for Lisp history and archives, such as the annotated Dylan book, and for his notes on running Common Lisp on small ARM boards.
21HN people shared it
10linked it in comments
11stories submitted
566story points
12 months agolast shared
2014people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine6 people · 302 points · first shared 2014 · 91 comments on HN
- 2Symbolics Genera Concepts4 people · 101 points · first shared 2014 · 4 comments on HN
- 3Symbolics Lisp Machine UI Examples4 people · 89 points · first shared 2014 · 26 comments on HN
- 4Talking with Mikel Evins about the Lisp-based Newton OS from Apple3 people · 68 points · first shared 2014 · 19 comments on HN
- 5Why Lisp Is Different2 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · 2 comments on HN
- 6Book.annotated2 people · first shared 2020
- 7Dylan: An object-oriented dynamic language1 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 8Flavors,%20a%20non hierarchical%20approach%20to%20object oriented%20programming.pdf1 people · first shared 2015
- 9Node3471 people · first shared 2014
- 1030ycltl1 people · first shared 2017
- 11Lispm 3a.mov1 people · first shared 2017
- 12Micro talespin.lisp1 people · first shared 2015
- 13Benchmarks1 people · first shared 2014
- 14Preface1 people · first shared 2018
- 15Design notes1 people · first shared 2020
What HN people wrote when they linked it
Jach · 2017-05-03
How I see it, Lisp 1.5 was Lisp, but as time went on and many 'versions' of Lisp for different systems with different capabilities came into being, there was no longer really a singular Lisp. Then there was a great unification that spit out Common Lisp, and that became Lisp. So if Lisp 1.5 was released today as something new, it wouldn't be Lisp, but merely another Lisp-like. It's too different. No one today thinks that if you drop "Lisp" in a conversation you really mean Lisp 1.5. (Maybe if you write it as LISP...) It's either going to mean Common Lisp, or maybe a reference to the vague Lisp Family. I don't think Lisp will ever be synonymous with "Scheme".
Maybe you'd appreciate some Lisp history, to also answer your question about "what other dialect[s]"?
http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html
http://lispm.de/30ycltl
lispm · 2014-04-23
I run a Lisp web server at home on an ODROID-XU.
http://lispm.de/ccl
The ODROID is much faster than a Raspberry Pi. Basically an U3 runs native Common Lisp ten times faster than the RPi.
I now have an XU, an X2 and the U3. The U3 is the best: small, no fan, silent, fast - and a bit cheaper.
linguae · 2022-08-31
One of the things that fascinates me about the history of the Newton is that if it weren't for complaints from those advocating C++ that escalated to John Sculley (who ruled in their favor), we may have ended up with mass-market machines that ran a Lisp operating system. There's a wonderful interview between lispm and Mikel Evins, two regular contributors on Hacker News, that can be found at http://lispm.de/lisp-based-newton-os.
I'm quite fascinated by pre-1997 Apple's projects. Before Jobs' return, Apple was an unfocused beacon of innovation; in its attempts to find a successor to the classic Mac OS, it explored various paths, but none of these paths led to a successor until Apple bought NeXT. Apple's more radical explorations during this era seem to have a profound Xerox PARC influence. Xerox PARC is probably most famous for Smalltalk and its GUI. However, there are many people who don't know that Xerox developed its own Lisp environment, Interlisp, which was known for its GUI (not all Lisp innovations came from MIT). These explorations ended once Apple committed to NeXT technology for its foundation in 1997, and today Apple has been pursuing its own direction (e.g., the iOS human interface guidelines, Swift, the gradual inclusion of iOS UI/UX elements and practices in macOS) that is distinct from the Xerox PARC, classic Macintosh, and NeXT traditions.
mikelevins · 2020-05-21
I just noticed that a sibling comment has a link to Rainer Joswig's archive of the Dylan book (Dylan, an Object Oriented Dynamic Language, the book I referred to above).
Here's the link again for reference in context:
http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/book.annotated/
I should have known Rainer would have it.
Even better: he's also archived the design notes:
http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/design-notes/
gnufx · 2020-05-19
Dylan originally used Lisp syntax, as documented in the Dylan Manual; there was angst when it changed. I don't have that with me, but it's online: http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/book.annotated/
snazz · 2019-03-22
I linked to the Internet Archive so as not to give the little board the hug of death, but I didn’t actually check the link to be sure it works and cannot edit it any longer. Apparently crawlers are blocked on lispm.de.
Here’s the original URL: http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics
vram22 · 2017-03-31
Hi,
I read this article on your site:
http://lispm.de/why-lisp-is-different
Quote from it:
[ When in doubt design software to be introspective.
when in doubt design software to be reflective. ]
What is the difference between introspective and reflective? I've used introspection in Python and know about and used (a bit) reflection in Java earlier, but thought they were roughly the same sort of thing. Please explain the difference if possible.
eudox · 2014-06-11
Related: A huge collections of images showing Symbolics UI and the software written for it: http://lispm.de/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples.html
edwintorok · 2014-06-11
I tried web.archive.org/save/http://<url>, but I got 'Access Forbidden for URI http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics'. The site itself loads fine in both firefox and chromium, but doesn't work with wget/curl. Probably some protection against robots / automated downloaders.
DonHopkins · 2025-11-20
That's one of the funniest and most enlightening classic AI Koans, originally from the ITS file "AI:HUMOR;AI KOANS".
Here's another Moon story from the humor directory:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/moon's.ghost
Moon's I.T.S. CRASH PROCEDURE document from his home directory, which goes into much more detail than just turning it off and on:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/moon/klproc.11
And some cool Emacs lore:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/eak/emacs.lore
Reposting this from the 2014 HN discussion of "Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878679
http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7879364
eudox on June 11, 2014
Related: A huge collections of images showing Symbolics UI and the software written for it:
http://lispm.de/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples
agumonkey on June 11, 2014
Nice, but I wouldn't confuse static images with the underlying semantic graph of live objects that's not visible in pictures.
DonHopkins on June 14, 2014
Precisely! When Lisp Machine programmer look at a screen dump, they see a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye.
I'll attempt to explain the deep implications of what the article said about "Everything on the screen is an object, mouse-sensitive and reusable":
There's a legendary story about Gyro hacking away on a Lisp Machine, when he accidentally trashed the…