"The current basic LISP system uses about 12,000 of the 32,000 [sic] memory of the 704."

12k is pretty impressive for a complete interpreter, including standard library. I don't really have anything useful to add to that, other than that I like it. It'd be nice if the java VM was 12k as well.

Also, I hadn't seen the Flexowriter before, that's a pretty awesome piece of hardware. It looks like it comes straight out of the Fallout universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter

  |It'd be nice if the java VM was 12k as well.

Why would that be nice? You surely know how complex the JVM is, and how different it is from a basic, single-threaded LISP interpreter running on bare metal on proprietary IBM hardware.

Well, this is a tangent, but...

I do know how complex the JVM is, and I don't like it. Yes, clearly 12k won't get you the JVM. I do think there is a smaller, leaner runtime for java possible. Having everything under the sun in the standard library is not a feature to me.

>Having everything under the sun in the standard library is not a feature to me.

Having stuff in the standard library sounds like the definition of a feature -- well, actually multiple features.

Plus, it's not like those are loaded into memory when not used.

Lastly, there are several stripped down java vms, some are even used for real time / embedded work.

Here, "feature" meant "a thing I want", not "a thing some users want"

But see, I don't want it. Then, one day, I do, because I'm working on something a bit different (or on the same thing, just with a different approach).

All those libraries buy me the freedom to do a bunch of different things. That freedom has some value, even if I never use it.

Languages that come with batteries are great, as the OS becomes largely irrelevant for most tasks.

As for the runtime size, the Truffle AOT compiler might help if it ever gets added to the reference JVM. Which is dependent on Graal replacing Hotspot I guess.

Another thing is the modularization, that will hopefully finally come with Java 9.

Surely the entire standard library isn't loaded with the bare runtime.

12k words (of 36 bits, iirc).

Ah, of course! My mind automatically filled in [bytes] where the [sic] is in that quote.

Page 88: "In the local M.I.T. patois, association lists [of atomic symbols] are also referred to as "property lists", and atomic symbols are sometimes called "objects"."

This is often cited as the first known usage of the word "object" in computer science.

Alan Kay, one of the fathers of OOP, on the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming”:

"[...] The second phase of this was to finally understand LISP and then using this understanding to make much nicer and smaller and more powerful and more late bound understructures."

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...

Yes, Smalltalk and Lisp do overlap quite a bit.