Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!decwrl!spar!malcolm
From: malcolm@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM (Malcolm Slaney)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Troubles
Message-ID: <811@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM>
Date: 19 Feb 88 17:34:42 GMT
References: <6908@sol.ARPA>
Reply-To: malcolm@spar.slb.com (Malcolm Slaney)
Organization: SPAR - Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Lines: 51

In article <6908@sol.ARPA> miller@ACORN.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Brad Miller) writes:
>    By comparison, what new hardware does Symbolics have in the pipe? The
>    only official thing we've heard about here is the Ivory VLSI chip
>    machine. It will supposedly deliver a 3x runtime improvement over the
>    3670.
>
>And more, when geometries shrink. 
And by then the merchent semiconductor companies will be running even
faster.  The real point is that it is widely acknowledged that Symbolics
has a lot of real nifty environment ideas.  Why do they continue to shoot
themselves in the foot by assuming they can build hardware better than
the rest of the world?

>
>    As if the growing hardware performance/$ gap were not sufficient reason
>    for unease at Symbolics, Sun is also making some right moves WRT their
>    LISP development environment. SPE, (Symbolic Programming Environment)
>    promises to bring much of the LISP machine - like development and
>    debugging functionality to the Sun's LISP environment. (The current Sun
>    LISP development environment could kindly be described as "sparse").
>
>Well, this too is an opinion, but from what I've heard, I'm not holding my
>breath. Lets face it, you can't make a lispm out of a box that is running
>UNIX. 
Why not?  Unix is just an overgrown IO multiplexer.  Both Franz and Lucid
now support lightweight processes in their systems; if you really want to 
read your mail from within Lisp you can load a Lisp mail reader into its
own process.  

>Now if you get rid of UNIX
Not all of us Symbolics hackers see this as an advantage.  I spend a lot
of time hacking on both Symbolics LispM's and Sun LispM's and there are
some things the Symbolics does better.  On the other hand the Sun Lisp's
have a lot of big advantages.  For example, when debugging package problems
it is SO nice to be able to reload a new world in only a few seconds instead
of waiting forever for the Symbolics machine to reboot.  Secondly the
network window systems on the Unix side of things (eg X and NeWS) make
it easy to run my Lisp on a remote compute server and have all my windows
on the local screen.  I do this all the time at work now (I have a 3/160
on my desk and use a 3/260 for my crunching) and I hope to do it even
more when I get an obsolete Sun 2 at home and run over 19.2K dialup.

There is no reason that the Symbolics machine can't do these things.  Suns
SPE is not the entire solution but it is a LONG way towards getting the
programming benefits of a Symbolics machine.

>SPARC may be a strong
>step in this direction, but someone needs to port Genera to it.
I'd love to see this...then we could compare them on more equal footing.

								Malcolm