What can you say about the contrast between the East Cost -vs- West Coast approaches to Lisp?
My impression is that Interlisp-D tried to solve problems with excellent tooling, which helped you get around the crappy language design, and Lisp Machines tried to solve problems with excellent language design, which helped you get around the crappy tooling. Kind of like two different manifestations of "Worse is Better", with different trade-offs for what they do worse.
I don't see any reason somebody should't simply combine excellent tooling with excellent language design! But here we are, with neither.
Maclisp/CADR Lisp was more to my taste, true, but to be fair Interlisp was originally developed at BBN, and folks like Teitelman and Bobrow were former MITers.
I agree the D machine had a more intensive UI while the cadrs and their descendants were more text oriented.
My impression is that Interlisp-D tried to solve problems with excellent tooling, which helped you get around the crappy language design, and Lisp Machines tried to solve problems with excellent language design, which helped you get around the crappy tooling. Kind of like two different manifestations of "Worse is Better", with different trade-offs for what they do worse.
I don't see any reason somebody should't simply combine excellent tooling with excellent language design! But here we are, with neither.