I think this is too much interpreting into it and the specific, and very different, views of people like Alan Kay and Richard Gabriel. Alan was a visionary who actually thought a lot about making programming and computing accessible - even to children. In the Lisp/AI community SOME were working on similar things (Minsky influenced LOGO for example). Richard Gabriel was running a Lisp vendor, which addressed the UNIX market with a higher-end Lisp development and delivery tool: Lucid Common Lisp. You'd shell out $20k and often much more for a machine and a LCL license. Customers were wealthy companies and government - the usual Lisp/AI customers who also wanted to deploy stuff efficiently.
> See the Lisp community practiced the Right Thing software philosophy which was also know as "The MIT Approach" and they were also known as "LISP Hackers".
A typical mistake is to believe that there is a single homogenous Lisp community, a single approach or a single philosophy. In fact the Lisp community was and is extremely diverse. If you look at the LISP hackers, their approach wasn't actually to do the 'right thing' (whatever that is), but to tackle interesting problems and having fun solving it. The Lisp Hackers at MIT (and other places like Stanford) were working for government labs swimming in money and people like Marvin Minsky provided a fantastic playground for them - which then clashed with the 'real world' when DARPA wanted to commercialize the research results it funded, to move the technology in to the field of military usage (also doing technology transfer into other application areas like civilian logistics). If you've ever looked at the Lisp Machine code, you see that it is full of interesting ideas, but the actual implementation is extremely diverse and grown over time. Often complex, under-documented, sketchy - not surprising since much of that was research prototypes and only some was developed for actual commercial markets. The 'MIT Approach' was creating baroque style designs. Is it the 'right thing' to have a language standard telling how to print integers as roman numbers?
Thus 'the right thing' might not be what you think - I think it is more 'image' than reality.
> The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for everyone in the world pervasively networked worldwide
That was Alan Kay's vision, not the vision of the Lisp community. Kay's vision was personal computing - and not the crippled version of Apple, IBM and others. Much of the Lisp community was working on AI and related. Which had much different visions and Lisp for them was a tool - they loved or hated. Lisp/AI developers think of it as 'AI assembler' - a low-level language implementing much higher-level languages ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming_l... ). When no effective systems were available to be used as powerful development environments for small and medium-sized research groups - they invented their own networked / interactive development system using the technology they knew best: Lisp. They hacked up development environments and even operating systems. But it was not necessary to keep them, once similar platforms were available from the market. With Lucid CL one could develop and deploy a complex Lisp application on a UNIX workstation and were not bound to a Lisp Machine - which was still more expensive, used special hardware/software and was less general as a computing platform. Lucid CL was quite successful in its niche for a while - but Gabriel then tried to make that technology slightly more mainstream by addressing C++ developers with a sophisticated development environment - sophisticated, and expensive. This tool was then sinking the company. But, anyway, much of the commercial AI development moved to C++ - for example most of the image/signal processing stuff.
Parts of the Lisp community shared different parts of the Kay vision: OOP as basic computing paradigm (Flavors, Object Lisp, CLOS, ...) , accessible programming (LOGO as an educational Lisp dialect), intellectual amplifiers (AI assistants) - but where Kay developed an integrated vision (Smalltalk and especially Smalltalk 80), the Lisp community was walking in all directions at the same time and this created literally hundreds of different implementations. Simple languages like Scheme were implemented a zillion times - but only sometimes with an environment like that of Smalltalk 80.
The Lisp community addressed both medium and high-end needs. Something like Interlisp-D (developed right next to Alan Kay - but as a development tool for Lisp/AI software and not addressing programming for children and similar) was a very unique programming tool, but its user base wasn't large and more towards the higher end of development - most of it still in AI. There was no attempt to make that thing popular in a wider way by for example selling it to a larger audience. It was eventually commercialized, but Xerox quit the market with the first signs of the AI winter in the 80s. Its actual and practical impact was and is also very limited, since only very few living developers have really seen it and almost no one has an idea what to do with it or even how to use it. It's basically lost art. I saw them in the end 80s when they were on they way out.
I doubt that from hundred authors of advocacy articles has even one used something like Interlisp-D or Lucid CL to develop or ship software. I know only very few people who have actually started it, even much less having seen it on a Xerox Lisp Machine. So much of it is based on some old people telling about it and very few have ever checked out how much of what they hear is actually true and how useful that stuff actually is. One reason for it: it's no longer available.
The 'worse is better' paper was slightly misaddressed at the Lisp users - since they were not after the operating system and base development tool market (like UNIX and C was) and were not married to a particular system or environment. They used Lisp on mainframes in the 60s/70s, on minicomputers in the 70s/80s, on personal workstations (even developing their own) in the end 70s / 80s and personal computers from the 80s onwards - unfortunately Lisp never really arrived at mobile systems - though it participated in an early attempt (transferring a lot of technology to the early Apple Newton - or what it was called before it was brought to the market - projects). The main Lisp influence on what we see as web technology, was the early influence on Javascript.
> See the Lisp community practiced the Right Thing software philosophy which was also know as "The MIT Approach" and they were also known as "LISP Hackers".
A typical mistake is to believe that there is a single homogenous Lisp community, a single approach or a single philosophy. In fact the Lisp community was and is extremely diverse. If you look at the LISP hackers, their approach wasn't actually to do the 'right thing' (whatever that is), but to tackle interesting problems and having fun solving it. The Lisp Hackers at MIT (and other places like Stanford) were working for government labs swimming in money and people like Marvin Minsky provided a fantastic playground for them - which then clashed with the 'real world' when DARPA wanted to commercialize the research results it funded, to move the technology in to the field of military usage (also doing technology transfer into other application areas like civilian logistics). If you've ever looked at the Lisp Machine code, you see that it is full of interesting ideas, but the actual implementation is extremely diverse and grown over time. Often complex, under-documented, sketchy - not surprising since much of that was research prototypes and only some was developed for actual commercial markets. The 'MIT Approach' was creating baroque style designs. Is it the 'right thing' to have a language standard telling how to print integers as roman numbers?
Thus 'the right thing' might not be what you think - I think it is more 'image' than reality.
> The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for everyone in the world pervasively networked worldwide
That was Alan Kay's vision, not the vision of the Lisp community. Kay's vision was personal computing - and not the crippled version of Apple, IBM and others. Much of the Lisp community was working on AI and related. Which had much different visions and Lisp for them was a tool - they loved or hated. Lisp/AI developers think of it as 'AI assembler' - a low-level language implementing much higher-level languages ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming_l... ). When no effective systems were available to be used as powerful development environments for small and medium-sized research groups - they invented their own networked / interactive development system using the technology they knew best: Lisp. They hacked up development environments and even operating systems. But it was not necessary to keep them, once similar platforms were available from the market. With Lucid CL one could develop and deploy a complex Lisp application on a UNIX workstation and were not bound to a Lisp Machine - which was still more expensive, used special hardware/software and was less general as a computing platform. Lucid CL was quite successful in its niche for a while - but Gabriel then tried to make that technology slightly more mainstream by addressing C++ developers with a sophisticated development environment - sophisticated, and expensive. This tool was then sinking the company. But, anyway, much of the commercial AI development moved to C++ - for example most of the image/signal processing stuff.
Parts of the Lisp community shared different parts of the Kay vision: OOP as basic computing paradigm (Flavors, Object Lisp, CLOS, ...) , accessible programming (LOGO as an educational Lisp dialect), intellectual amplifiers (AI assistants) - but where Kay developed an integrated vision (Smalltalk and especially Smalltalk 80), the Lisp community was walking in all directions at the same time and this created literally hundreds of different implementations. Simple languages like Scheme were implemented a zillion times - but only sometimes with an environment like that of Smalltalk 80.
The Lisp community addressed both medium and high-end needs. Something like Interlisp-D (developed right next to Alan Kay - but as a development tool for Lisp/AI software and not addressing programming for children and similar) was a very unique programming tool, but its user base wasn't large and more towards the higher end of development - most of it still in AI. There was no attempt to make that thing popular in a wider way by for example selling it to a larger audience. It was eventually commercialized, but Xerox quit the market with the first signs of the AI winter in the 80s. Its actual and practical impact was and is also very limited, since only very few living developers have really seen it and almost no one has an idea what to do with it or even how to use it. It's basically lost art. I saw them in the end 80s when they were on they way out.
I doubt that from hundred authors of advocacy articles has even one used something like Interlisp-D or Lucid CL to develop or ship software. I know only very few people who have actually started it, even much less having seen it on a Xerox Lisp Machine. So much of it is based on some old people telling about it and very few have ever checked out how much of what they hear is actually true and how useful that stuff actually is. One reason for it: it's no longer available.
The 'worse is better' paper was slightly misaddressed at the Lisp users - since they were not after the operating system and base development tool market (like UNIX and C was) and were not married to a particular system or environment. They used Lisp on mainframes in the 60s/70s, on minicomputers in the 70s/80s, on personal workstations (even developing their own) in the end 70s / 80s and personal computers from the 80s onwards - unfortunately Lisp never really arrived at mobile systems - though it participated in an early attempt (transferring a lot of technology to the early Apple Newton - or what it was called before it was brought to the market - projects). The main Lisp influence on what we see as web technology, was the early influence on Javascript.