Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine

I've managed today to boot OpenGenera in a Linux VM. It took me a couple of weeks but it finally works. I intend to have a look myself at what the fuss is all about. If you're interested, here are some pointers to relevant resources (snap4.tar.gz image works as advertised): http://www.advogato.org/person/johnw/diary/12.html http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux http://libarynth.org/vlm_on_linux The opengenera tar-ball can be found in the intertubes. Tip: Use Ubuntu 7.04 x86-64 to save you some trouble. I don't know…

It was by far the most productive environment I ever used. I was the architect of the lower levels of cyc (Guha the higher levels) and in a short time I was able to write enormous amounts of code that was used for years. There aren’t really other exploratory development environments like that any more. I actually switched the team from D machines to symbolics machines (I had previously worked on D machines at PARC so it wasn’t a familiarity…

Since the article hammers on about Cyc -- I architected Cyc at MCC, rebuilding the project from the bottom up, developing a layered architecture (that others then took in directions I hadn't imagined) which really emphasizes the reusability and component architecture that was possible with the lispm (I used the predecessors of them as well when I was at MIT and at other research labs). I agree with the 100K LoC in a year, in order of magnitude at least…