| There are emulators for the old Lisp Machines. The best were Medley (for the old Interlisp-D system from Xerox) and Open Genera from Symbolics. They are philosophical relatively near to Pharo. But Pharo has seen more development in the past decade. For Common Lisp there are/were many integrated IDEs: Macintosh Common Lisp, Allegro CL, LispWorks, Clozure CL on the Mac, Corman Lisp on Windows upto McCLIM for several CL implementations. A general difference to Pharo is usually that these CL IDEs use mostly native user interfaces. Pharo comes with its own user interface, graphics, window system, display code, event handling, ... Example: Pharo windows on a Mac are not Mac windows. Clozure CL windows on the Mac are Cocoa windows. Similar: most CL systems use native code. The real commercial Smalltalk machines were underpowered compared to some of the Lisp Machines - for example those from Symbolics - but those were also quite a bit more expensive. It was possible to spend more than $100k for a Symbolics Lisp Machine with accelerated color graphics and HDTV in/out. The main difference of Pharo with integrated Lisp environments: 1) Pharo uses portable system independent images. Most Lisp systems uses system (OS / architecture) specific images, since code is natively compiled. 2) Pharo code is not native AOT compiled, IIRC. Common Lisp is either source interpreted or AOT compiled - some are even AOT compiled only - with incremental AOT runtime compiler. 3) Pharo uses its own user interface & gui system. Most Common Lisp systems use a native backend for their GUI. Recent exception is Mezzano, which a CL on the metal, which comes with its own GUI. 4) Pharo/Smalltalk usually manages and tracks source code for the user. Most CL IDEs use files and the user works with files and systems of files. CL then more or less tracks the code in these files. 5) Pharo offers to save state in an image between sessions - Lisp systems use that mostly on demand and less as a session state mechanism. LispWorks has some support for sessions. |
Quantel Harry was the competition.
Link below, is for the 1981 Quantel Paintbox, the existence of which is responsible for the direction of my juvenile mind.
I should love to one day get together with like minded folk and assemble a complete ca. '89 broadcast graphics suite. I'm in advertising (London, independent, founder) and I'm not convinced that I couldn't work out the financial arithmetic favourably. I am persuaded by artist friends of the merit, tempered I expect by the reality of the working interfaces, if they actually used a 80s Quantel - we take instantaneous responsiveness for granted.. Time and place required, but I'm serious enough to have scouted premises and allocated budget.
I digress. Sorry.
I only have read about Pharo in the last couple of weeks, but I am taken by the sophistication of the ambitions and delivery thereof. I say this here, rather thanon a Pharo list, because I am unsure of what skills and specialities are required, but I have a professional itch to scratch, which is estimating the work of supporting a new language to the fullest extent possible, in Visual Studio. If this could be accomplished in under half a man year for a senior developer, I really want to know. (result to be released to community, purpose of exercise purely personal curiosity about what consequent effect is possible)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox