This gives me fond memories and actually LispMe turned out to be literally life changing for me. Not that I used that app much, but as I just had gotten a Palm Pilot 3, I liked playing with it a bit. But it triggered my interest into finally learning Lisp and Scheme and that had a big influence onto my professional career which turned from the prospect being a Java programmer into a professional Lisper, which I still am today.
In my eyes, the Palm Pilot 3 was a really amazing device. Portable, long run time and with an 8 MHz 68000 processor up to most tasks. A bit a pity, there was not a larger eco system around it and it was basically the last of its kind.
LispMe was very cute, though of course not for larger tasks. Still, as written above, quite life changing :)
It was not quite so pivotal for me, but it was also my first Lisp and probably made me a more functional programmer :) I spent many long bus rides toying with puzzles and ideas in LispMe, my Palm precariously balanced on my (paper) notebook.
Of course I have all sorts of portable computers now. But I have kept my Palm. It still impresses me. There's a certain magic to it. A computer, a general-purpose programmable computer. And it fits in a shirt pocket and runs on AAA batteries. A real wonder of 20th century technology.
I recommend reading the interpreter code. It is quite interesting and really clean. It feels like by gone hacker age where just doing simple stuff would get you far. Nowadays I guess a project like this would be a bloated mess.
I wonder if that’s the contrast between bespoke furniture vs ikea. Anyone can build a lisp interpreter these days with judicious npm install usage. I guess the spark’s been lost. On the other hand more people have decent furniture..
But I agree with the author in that, beyond emulation, i.e. regarding actual devices and real-world usage, Palm OS effectively died some time in the late 2000s.
It was ultimately a victim of its early success, I'd say – the legacy (Garnet) ecosystem was too large for the very ambitous Cobalt project to ever get traction with device manufacturers and developers working on the platform.
Those day, for reasons, I would often find myself waiting without
a computer. I spent some of it implementing a Go game tree viewer and editor (including branching) with graphical Goban display, all in LispMe - entirely coded with a stylus! I should restore it.
ADD: I connected him
with my professor and he got
a publication out of it
In my eyes, the Palm Pilot 3 was a really amazing device. Portable, long run time and with an 8 MHz 68000 processor up to most tasks. A bit a pity, there was not a larger eco system around it and it was basically the last of its kind. LispMe was very cute, though of course not for larger tasks. Still, as written above, quite life changing :)