Dan Weinreb’s blog

I just came across “Symbolics, Inc: A failure of heterogeneous engineering” by Alvin Graylin, Kari Anne Hoir Kjolaas, Jonathan Loflin, and Jimmie D. Walker III (it doesn’t say with whom they are affiliated, and there is no date), at http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/Symbolics.pdf

This is an excellent paper, and if you are interested in what happened to Symbolics, it’s a must-read.

The paper’s thesis is based on a concept called “heterogeneous engineering”, but it’s hard to see what they mean by that other than “running a company well”. They have fancy ways of saying that you can’t just do technology, you have to do marketing and sales and finance and so on, which is rather obvious. They are quite right about the wide diversity of feelings about the long-term vision of Symbolics, and I should have mentioned that in my essay as being one of the biggest problems with Symbolics. The random directions of R&D, often not co-ordinated with the rest of the company, are well-described here (they had good sources, including lots of characteristically, harshly honest email from Dave Moon). The separation between the software part of the company in Cambridge, MA and the hardware part of the company in Woodland Hills (later Chatsworth) CA was also a real problem. They say “Once funds were available, Symbolics was spending money like a lottery winner with new-found riches” and that’s absolutely correct. Feature creep was indeed extremely rampant. The paper also has financial figures for Symbolics, which are quite interesting and revealing, showing a steady rise through 1986, followed by falling revenues and negative earnings from 1987 to 1989.

Here are some points I dispute. They say “During the years of growth Symbolics had been searching for a CEO”, leading up to the hiring of Brian Sear. I am pretty sure that only happened when the trouble started. I disagree with the statement by Brian Sear that we didn’t take care of our current customers; we really did work hard at that, and I think that’s one of the reasons so many former Symbolics customers are so nostalgic. I don’t think Russell is right that “many of the Symbolics machines were purchased by researchers funded through the Star Wars program”, a point which they repeat many times. However, many were funded through DARPA, and if you just substitute that for all the claims about “Star Wars”, then what they say is right. The claim that “the proliferation of LISP machines may have exceeded the proliferation of LISP programmers” is hyperbole. It’s not true that nobody thought about a broader market than the researchers; rather, we intended to sell to value-added resellers (VAR’s) and original equipment manufacturers (OEM’s). The phrase “VARs and OEMs” was practically a mantra. Unfortunately, we only managed to do it once (ICAD). While they are right that Sun machines “could be used for many other applications”, the interesting point is the reason for that: why did Sun’s have many applications available? The rise of Unix as a portable platform, which was a new concept at the time, had a lot to do with it, as well as Sun’s prices. They don’t consider why Apollo failed.

There’s plenty more. To the authors, wherever you are: thank you very much!

There are ten currently-maintained implementation of Common Lisp. What are they, and what are they like? What do they cost, are they open-source, and where do you get them? What platforms do they run on? Where did they come from? What platforms do they run on? Do they support threads, streams, CLIM, the CLOS MOP, and/or profiling? Answers to these questions and more can be found in my survey.

There’s also a glossary of terms, a table of some major Common Lisp libraries showing which implementations are supported, a long list of papers about Common Lisp, some success stories of Common Lisp applications, a list of Common Lisp textbooks that are available online, and an extensive list of Common Lisp resources, all with links.

My deepest thanks to everyone who responded to the survey (see the list in the paper), to Drew Crampsie and Common-Lisp.net for helping me host the paper, and to Pascal Costanza for all his advice and help.

I have ordered a Quanta XO-1 (One Laptop Per Child) on the Give One, Get One deal, where you pay $400 plus shipping and you get an XO and donate one to the project ($200 tax deduction). This is just so cool that I have to have one. And I need a lightweight box that can do email and browsing that I can carry around easily. There are other good options but the XO is so novel and interesting! It’s just 3+ lb and runs on 2-3 watts with an amazing lithium ferro-phosphate battery, and physically extremely durable, waterproof, and dirtproof, and a great (but small, 7.5 inch) screen. No disk nor CD/DVD, but you can add them externally. And if the OLPC project is a big success, this may be the platform of the next generation of hackers. They are aiming to bring the price down to $100.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification

After watching a talk given at Google by Ivan Krstic, I got more and more excited hearing about the hardware and the software. A lot (14, apparently) of hackers, at least some of whom are famous superhackers (e.g. Jim Gettys), were involved in putting together the software. They have thought of and taken care of a huge number of issues. Perhaps I’ll end up contributing open source code to the project someday, although at the moment I’m too busy for that to be feasible.

The Give One Get One deal is only available for another 7 days. It may be hard to get them after that since they are going to be sold only to schools and other educational institutions and governments and in the third world. So if you want one, don’t hesitate:

http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php www.xogiving.org

The only thing I’m worried about is that David Pogue in the New York Times says that the XO’s keyboard is too small for an adult to touchtype on. I asked around, and Luke Gorrie (of SLIME fame) says that it’s frustrating at first but then he learned to touchtype on it at high speed. (I was going to walk over to the Media Lab and try one but I have no time in the next seven days and I’m just too convinced now.) And so many people seem to get along fine on much smaller keyboards, such as those on the Blackberry or smart phones (not touchtyping, obviously, but good enough for email when I’m on the road). So I’ll chance it. Other drawbacks: 2 minutes to boot (hey, Lisp machines booted slowly), and switching between apps is “poky”. (But the apps are fast.)

In a previous post, I mentioned capability architectures. The XO’s “Bitfrost” is not a capability system, but it does deal with the issue of mutually-suspicious protection domains. Given how many XO-1′s there will be, if the project succeeds, it will be an obvious target for malware, and I think Bitfrost will be a big help there. Bitfrost works by dividing up protection domains at a coarse level, whereas I’m more interested in very-fine-level schemes. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitfrost

Great technical info in the video of the talk at Google by Ivan Krstic, who is the architect of Bitfrost but talks about all aspects of the system:

General info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1

Main web site, but it seems to be down at the moment:

laptop.org

David Pogue’s review in The New York Times, both written and video. Pogue does lots of product reviews and I have a lot of confidence in his evaluations (and I love his books).

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/technology/circuits/04pogue.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=6ffd976ed367bacae4171dd4999d36431c84b0f5

There’s plenty more if you Google for “OLPC”.

The XO does everything in Python. You can see all the code, with a single keystroke (that shows the code of what’s running) and even modify the code. In the video, the speaker (Ivan Krstic’) is asked “Why not just use Lisp or Smalltalk?”, and the questioner cites Lisp machines! See, our influence is still there! He replies that doing everything in Python “comes close to the general Lisp machine idea” (of course he, too, knows what a Lisp machine is!). Answer: he protests that it’s a lot like a Lisp machine except that the language doesn’t go all the way down to the metal (it’s based on Linux). Hey are also shipping Squeak (a modern Smalltalk). They used Python because of the “size and momentum” of the community, and because he feels that Lisp has a steeper learning curve than Python does for kids. I won’t object to those reasons.

Hey, Python, Lisp, what’s the difference? So, strange as it is to say, maybe this is the new Lisp machine!