Why did Symbolics fail?

DLW's thesis that Symbolics lost as part of the general losing of custom hardware (including all the parallel computer companies) is basically correct. Lucid on Suns was as fast as ZetaLisp on Symbolicses. <p>But not so fast that that alone made me switch. What made me switch was that Lisp machines (both Symbolics and LMI) were so gratuitously, baroquely complex. The manuals filled a whole shelf. Each component of the software was written as if it had to have every possible feature. The hackers who wrote it were the smartest and most energetic around. But there was no Steve Jobs to tell them "No, this is too complex." So the guy in charge of writing the pretty-printer, for example, would decide. "This is going to be the most powerful pretty-printer ever written. It's going to be able to do everything!"<p>I learned how to program a Symbolics myself, from reading the manuals. I sometimes suspected that I was the only person who'd ever done this-- that everyone else who knew how to use the damn things had either learned how from the guys who invented them, or had learned from someone else who had. The libraries were so hairy that I generally found it was faster to write something myself than find and understand the documentation for the built-in way of doing it.<p>Unfortunately this complexity persists in Common Lisp, which was pretty much copied directly from ZetaLisp. In fact, both of the worst flaws in CL are due to its origins on Lisp machines: both its complexity and the way it's cut off from the OS.

1. This sounds an awful lot like the story of NeXt, from making their own custom hardware, to the super advanced software development environment that they eventually tried to sell by itself for other platforms. Too bad there was no struggling, mainstream company to buy them that they could have then taken over from the inside.<p>2. Half way through, I was thinking, it would be fun to contrast this with ITA as bad and good examples of how to start a Lisp company with a bunch of guys from MIT. And then he says he works at ITA! So, lesson is, if you're going to start a Lisp company, don't make Lisp the product, make it your secret weapon.

In all fairness, the manuals that filled a whole shelf documented a lot of major applications. On my desk right now, I have a copy of the O'Reilley book on Subversion (a source control system). I have another book on Emacs. And so on. ALL of those things were covered in that shelf.<p>Regarding simplicity versus complexity, please see <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html</a>. Different people want different things; you can't just provide the common 20%.<p>Over the last few days, I have been surveying the WWW for criticisms of Common Lisp. The two that I see most often are: (1) it's too big, and (2) it's missing so many important features like threads, sockets, database connectivity, operating system interoperability, Unicode, and so on. Ironic, no?<p>It is really too bad that Common Lisp was not defined as a language core, plus libraries. We did originally intend to do that (they would have been called the "White Pages" and "Yellow Pages"), but we were under too much time pressure.<p>There is no question that Common Lisp is a lot less elegant that it could have been, had it been designed from scratch. Instead, it had two major design constraints: (1) it had to be back-compatible with MacLisp and Zetalisp in order to accommodate the large body of existing software, such as Macsyma, and (2) it had to merge several post-MacLisp dialects, in a diplomatic process (run magnificently by Guy L. Steele Jr) that made everyone reasonably satisfied. It was quite literally a design by committee, and the results were exactly what you'd expect.<p>But the imperative was to get all the post-MacLisp implementations to conform to a standard. If we failed, DARPA would have picked InterLisp as the reigning Lisp dialect, and we would have all been in a great deal of trouble. (Look where InterLisp is today; actually there's nowhere to look.)<p>You wonder how other people learned to use Symbolics machines. Some of them took courses - we had an extensive education department. Before you say "that proves that it was too complicated", keep in mind that the system was very large and functional because that's what its primary target market wanted. We did not get feedback from customers saying "make it simpler"; we got feedback saying "add more features, as follows". I bet the people who maintain the Java libraries are rarely asked to remove large amounts of the libraries.<p>I'm not sure what the reference to Steve Jobs is about. Look at how many features the Macintosh has now. It takes a long time to learn all of them. Their documentation is much shorter because they don't give you any; you have to go to the book store and buy David Pogue's "The Missing Manual" books.<p>I admit that some (not most) of the complexity was gratuitous and baroque, but not because we liked it that way. The complexity (mainly the non-uniformity) of Common Lisp was beyond our control (e.g. the fact that you can't call methods on an array or a symbol, and so on). Some of the subsystems were too complex (the "namespace system", our distributed network resource naming facility) comes to mind.<p>In summary, I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, but the reasons for the problems were more involved.<p>-- Dan Weinreb