this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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Lisp Community

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A community for the Lisp family of programming languages.

Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language. Only Fortran is older, by one year.

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[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 days ago (8 children)

My understanding is that the CADR software was/is free. I never used Allegro and had only slight exposure to the CADR and Symbolics machines but where the article says

there is no reason at all why a development environent that cool could not be built on stock hardware

that papers over a big gap between "could be" and "is". The Lisp machine debugging environment was certainly superior to the mainstream stuff I see today. We get by anyway of course.

I do believe there was once an on and off effort to emulate the CADR hardware and run the original CADR software. IDK if that ever got anywhere. I mostly lost interest in Lisp much earlier. And running every program on the machine in a single shared address space these days would be silly, I agree.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago (7 children)

I do think a lot of the ideas from Lisp Machines could be adopted in modern environments though. For example, it blows my mind that REPL driven development is still a niche thing today. The sad part is that Js is ubiquitous nowadays, and Js VMs technically support a lot of the features. You can inspect running apps, make changes, see results immediately. All that's really missing is having a network API that would let you connect an editor to the running app, and reload functions.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago (6 children)

All that’s really missing is having a network API that would let you connect an editor to the running app, and reload functions.

Erlang has that :).

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