First, that there is so much Lisp activity now, when it was given up for dead a decade ago. Admittedly these are all “marginal applications,” not “mainstream,” but most seem very real for all that.

Second, that there is so much new development, especially in the area of libraries and frameworks. If I wanted to make a living as a Lisp guy again, I would not be able to do it without starting with an awful lot of learning.

Finally, that in 25 years nobody has come up with anything so clearly better than Common Lisp as to replace it. Could be another case of “worse is better,” really meaning “good enough is good enough.”

NerdCore Rising was actually filmed just up the street from me (OK about 6 blocks away). So I feel a certain connection to it. Feel free to pimp it!

Someone with a better memory please correct me, but I seem to remember that you could put together a nicely loaded Sun-2 (and later Sun-3) workstation for around $50K; that was pretty close to the starting price for a stripped-down 36XX series. You’d be looking at well over $100K for a Symbolics comparable to the Sun in terms of CPU speed, RAM, and disk space. (The Symbolics system did however include essentially the same hardware as a Sun-2 as a front-end for the Lisp engine.)

But the real trick wasn’t just comparing one box against another: for the same price as the Symbolics, you could buy one really loaded Sun (that could be used as a workstation-cum-server) plus a couple more stripped-down Sun workstations. And then you could network the Suns and have a complete environment for a small software development team–for the same price as one single-user Symbolics workstation. And if you added another coder to the team? You bought another $25K stripped-down Sun and hooked it up to the network. No such option with the Symbolics.

That’s the way I remember it. The company I worked for at the time did indeed buy a few Symbolics for a specific project, along with a few Apollos, etc., but mostly we–like many, many other companies–bought lots of Suns.