I installed Medley Interlisp because I because I've been following @amoroso@fosstodon.org for too long! 😅
The first goal is to have a retro-computing environment that can be useful. As far as I can tell, the documentation buttons open links in the browser outside (!) the Medley Interlisp system, i.e. I can read the documentation on my default browser. I like it.
Plan 9 had a similar black-and-white retro windowing system vibe and an old-school web browser called *mothra*. The Wikipedia page also lists other web browser. When I tried it, I felt that the browser was so limiting that it turned Plan 9 into a system I’d never be able to use on a daily basis. Designing Medley Interlisp such that it has this fuzzy boundary and can access a web browser and a PDF viewer outside is great; the great part about Plan 9 running on real chip architecture is of course that you can install it on an actual computer like a Raspberry Pi.
The second goal I have with Medley Interlisp is to have a Lisp machine where everything is Lisp. I mean, I guess I usually treat Emacs as a Lisp machine. But it's mostly a text-based environment. Which is great, don't get me wrong. And I'm sure all the things I could ever want from a retro Lisp machine can be done in Emacs.
Oberon had a similar text interface but from the bottom-up: an operating system, programming language, text user interface… but when I tried it in the nineties I could bot make heads or tails of it – and I didn’t know much about the programming language. And that was its point: everything is Oberon and you can understand it all. I just failed to grasp it.
Plan 9 has a similar focus but it's written in C and that gives me headaches. Whenever I consider working on a project written in C, I shrink back a little. It always feels like so much needs to be done before even a little gets accomplished. But that just goes to show how little I know about C. Lisp is probably the same thing but I know very little about Lisp, too.
Another distraction beyont Medley Interlisp is Oddµ. I recently added preview functionality to it. Yay!
I love how it is still a small core program, a kind of web application and command line tool, where a lot of the user interface is based on HTML templates.
Another distraction betond that is that really want to play Ultima 4.
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But I am of course mostly thinking about Israel waging war on Palestine and Russia waging war on Ukraine.
What a shit show.