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> They are amazing but they cannot easily move to different machines and sharing parts of them is hard to separate from the rest of the living organism. The code of a Symbolics Lisp Machine is written in so-called "systems". A "system" is a collection of files in a directory. Moving the code to another machine is either a) a copy of the directories to another directory or b) dumping an archive to copy to somewhere else or c) most of the time not necessary, since the Lisp Machine edits files on NFS file servers , which makes it possible to share the Lisp code directly with other Lisp systems in the network. The Symbolics keeps track of versions of files and systems, something other Lisp systems typically don't do themselves. > As such, the Linux "stability" combined with x86 won, same as C and friends because of the tooling that made the code "portable". There is little stability. The main theme is ever evolving fragmentation. Linux / BSDs is fragmented in zillions distributions, variants, versions, competing library variants, software archive systems, ... and open source UNIX is fragmented into various BSDs, Linux variants, ... Look at some portable code, it uses a huge configuration checker, which looks for all the variations of code and libraries. Zillions of checks... |
