Re:Lisp Machine Manual (1984)
by davexunit on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @03:06PM
(#15186260)
It all comes back to the "worse is better" thing. Frequently enough the technologies in mainstream usage are not the best, technically speaking. Mainstream programming languages are still playing catch up on the features that the Lisp family of languages has had for decades. UNIX succeeded not because it was the best OS of the time (it wasn't, MIT made much better systems) but it had a killer feature: it ran on commodity hardware, the PDP-11.
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but it had a killer feature: it ran on commodity hardware, the PDP-11
That is not the essence of worse is better. UNIX won over the others because it was simple and regular, and was built from components that could be reassembled into more complex things. Pipes were a big part of that.
UNIX had a weak design. It won not because it was good, but because it ran on more computers. There are many other OSes of that time period that had superior designs.
The Lisp Machine had way better composition primitives than UNIX's pipes passing plain text around.