Comment by kazinator
16 days ago
The Lisp machine companies killed Lisp. They were the ones who blew Lisp sky high, but they also created expensive, monstrous workstations running Lisp images requiring tens of megabytes of RAM. Developers used them for prototyping and then had to cob something together to ship to the users, who had hardware like IBM PC machines with less than a meg of RAM.
Today's cruft like you ... Python, JS, whatever ... would not stand a chance in the world of the 1980s on that hardware.
It's amazing how far they were able to bloat up Lisp while continuing to peddle it commercially.
Leaner Lisps running on small systems existed all along, but they would rescue Lisp from the associations brought about by big Lisp.
>would not stand a chance in the world of the 1980s on that hardware
This is what fascinates me about Unix, they created an OS which works with text and processes, as opposed to binary structures and function calls when computers were hundreds of times slower. Even today the overhead of process creation and serialization for pipes is not negligible, how the hell did they manage to do it in 1970s?