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by mark_l_watson·16y ago·view on hn ↗
In 1982 the CEO and Treasurer of my company (SAIC) bought me a Xerox 1108 - definitely a great box, especially because it was back in 1982.

Lisp purists will probably slam me for this (with adequate justification) but I prefer the modern Lisp ecosystem with:

* both free/open source and commercial Lisp environments

* free deployment using open source systems like SBCL, etc. (In ancient history, I only used my 1108 for marketing prototypes and research because there was no reasonably priced deployment strategy)

* when I do want a persistent heap setup, I use SBCL and dump new images as I work. I don't often use this mode unless I have a lot of data that I am using over a long period of time - otherwise reloading source at the beginning of each work session is OK.

* emacs + slime is a good environment

If you want image based development, I would suggest that you try Squeak Smalltalk (liberal open source license) or Cincom Smalltalk (modest cost, good support and features, and a good deployment strategy). I think that using Cincom is totally free until you start making money with it.

1 comments
Except--no offense--the Xerox Lisp machine couldn't hold a candle to the MIT CADR machine and its spin-offs (Symbolics/LMI) when it came to the development environment.