As someone who used Franz LISP on Sun workstations while someone else nearby used a Symbolics 3600 refrigerator-sized machine, I was never all that impressed with the LISP machine.
The performance wasn't all that great. Initially garbage collection took 45 minutes, as it tried to garbage-collect paged-out code. Eventually that was fixed.
The hardware was not very good. Too much wire wrap and slow, arrogant maintenance.
I once had a discussion with the developers of Franz LISP. The way it worked was that it compiled LISP source files and produced .obj files. But instead of linking them into an executable, you had to load them into a run-time environment. So I asked, "could you put the run time environment in another .obj file, so you just link the entire program and get a standalone executable"? "Why would you want to do that?" "So we could ship a product." This was an alien concept to them.
So was managing LISP files with source control, like everything else. LISP gurus were supposed to hack.
And, in the end, 1980s "AI" technology didn't do enough to justify that hardware.
The hardware was not very good. Too much wire wrap and slow, arrogant maintenance.
I once had a discussion with the developers of Franz LISP. The way it worked was that it compiled LISP source files and produced .obj files. But instead of linking them into an executable, you had to load them into a run-time environment. So I asked, "could you put the run time environment in another .obj file, so you just link the entire program and get a standalone executable"? "Why would you want to do that?" "So we could ship a product." This was an alien concept to them.
So was managing LISP files with source control, like everything else. LISP gurus were supposed to hack.
And, in the end, 1980s "AI" technology didn't do enough to justify that hardware.