> What does a Lisp Machine of the future look like?
Depends on what one means by that.
Dedicated hardware? I doubt that we’ll ever see that again, although of course I could be wrong.
A full OS? That’s more likely, but only just. If it had some way to run Windows, macOS or Linux programs (maybe just emulation?) then it might have a chance.
As a program? Arguably Emacs is a Lisp Machine for 2025.
Provocative question: would a modern Lisp Machine necessarily use Lisp? I think that it probably has to be a language like Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth or Tcl. It’s hard to put into words what these very different languages share that languages such as C, Java and Python lack, but I think that maybe it reduces down to elegant dynamism?
> Provocative question: would a modern Lisp Machine necessarily use Lisp?
Seeing that not even "Original Gangster" Lisp Machine used Lisp ...
Both the Lambda and CADR are RISCy machines with very little specific to Lisp (the CADR was designed specifically to just run generic VM instructions, one cool hack on the CADR was to run PDP-10 instructions).
By Emacs you definitely mean GNU Emacs -- there are other implementations of Emacs. To most people, what the Lisp Machine was (is?), was a full operating system with editor, compiler, debugger and very easy access to all levels of the system. Lisp .. wasn't the really interesting thing, Smalltalk, Oberon .. share the same idea.
> Dedicated hardware? I doubt that we’ll ever see that again, although of course I could be wrong.
Since we're now building specialized hardware for AI, emergence of languages like Mojo that take advantage of hardware architecture and what I interpret as a renewed interest in FPGAs perhaps specialized hardware is making a comeback.
If I understand computing history correctly, chip manufacturers like Intel optimized their chips for C language compilers to take advantage of economies of scale created by C/Unix popularity. This came with the cost of killing off lisp/smalltalk specialized hardware that gave these high level languages decent performance.
Alan Kay famously said that people who are serious about their software should make their own hardware.
Currently working on an accurate model of the MIT CADR in VHDL, and merging the various System source trees into one that should work for Lambda, and CADR.
Maybe try replacing the ALU with one written directly in Verilog, I suspect this will run a lot faster than building it up from 74181+74182 components.
The current state is _very_ fast in simulation to the point where it is uninteresting (there are other things to figure out) to write something as a behavioral model of the '181/'182.
~100 microcode instructions takes about 0.1 seconds to run.
Depends on what one means by that.
Dedicated hardware? I doubt that we’ll ever see that again, although of course I could be wrong.
A full OS? That’s more likely, but only just. If it had some way to run Windows, macOS or Linux programs (maybe just emulation?) then it might have a chance.
As a program? Arguably Emacs is a Lisp Machine for 2025.
Provocative question: would a modern Lisp Machine necessarily use Lisp? I think that it probably has to be a language like Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth or Tcl. It’s hard to put into words what these very different languages share that languages such as C, Java and Python lack, but I think that maybe it reduces down to elegant dynamism?