Restoration project headed up by Steve Kaisler is gathering steam
Xerox’s pioneering graphical Lisp workstation operating system is not only alive, well, and MIT-licensed, but running in the cloud as well as on modern OSes.
Last week, the British Computer Society hosted a talk about the the Medley Interlist Restoration Project by Steve Kaisler of George Washington University, who literally wrote the book on Interlisp. Medley is a bit more than just a programming language, or even a nonstandard dialect of Lisp, though, but to try to convey its significance, we need to delve into history a little.
When a computer company goes out of business, or withdraws from a market and discontinues the software it built, it’s quite common to hear calls for that software to be open sourced and made available to the world. Very occasionally, it even happens. Unfortunately, when it does, the usual result is that everyone totally ignores it: learning to navigate a substantial codebase and then trying to modernize it so that it can be run on modern modern hardware, and maybe even be useful again, is a massive undertaking. So nobody does it, and it quietly moulders away, ignored and unloved, until it’s of no conceivable use to anyone. That’s pretty much what happened to Parehelion’s massively parallel cluster OS Helios, for instance.
But not always.
Once upon a time, long ago, there was a war between two rival factions over the right way to build computers. In the end, one side won, as one side usually does, and it is the side that got to write the history books, and so in its telling, it quietly dropped most mentions of the conflict. All that survives are a few strange tools running in an alien environment. The reasons for the war and the battling camps are a story for another time, but one result is that some people are so passionate about this type of OS, and this type of programming language, that they are volunteering their efforts to preserve a rare piece of materiel from that war.
Lisp isn’t dead. Several flavors of Lisp are still around, of course. One flavor got standardized way back in 1994, and there’s an solid, fast, FOSS implementation for most modern OSes… but it’s a somewhat stark, text-only environment. There’s also Scheme, which was once an academic favorite but arguably lacks a certain practicality. And of course much of hacker favorite Emacs is implemented in its own, idiosyncratic dialect, which can’t really be separated from the editor. (There are also several commercial versions with fancy GUIs and development tools, but the Reg FOSS desk is writing this and we’re interested in the open source stuff.)
Our favorite summary of the differences comes from blogger and developer Steve Yegge:
From this one can deduce that Common Lisp is something of a compromise and lacks some degree of elegance.
