I had a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine from 1982 to about 1987 (and for one month, I ran Smalltalk on it rather than Lisp).
Yes, it was awesome compared to using a timeshared VAX (or whatever), but as fantastic as my 1108 was for its time and no matter how much I loved it at the time, I like my development environments today a lot more. Examples: development and debugging of both server side and client side code (GWT on client, something REST full on the server side) with IntelliJ Java debuggers open on both client and server code - hopefully you may only need this once a month but useful when you need it. Repl based development with a smart IDE (like Clojure in IntelliJ or Ruby in RubyMine). Interactive Scala worksheets in the Eclipse/ScalaIDE (sort of like Chris's Light Table).
In addition to a lot of NLP work on my 1108, I was also just getting into neural networks back then and my NN simulations ran like mollasses on the 1108. Any of my laptops are many orders of magnitude faster for just about anything I do than my 1108.
Yes, it was awesome compared to using a timeshared VAX (or whatever), but as fantastic as my 1108 was for its time and no matter how much I loved it at the time, I like my development environments today a lot more. Examples: development and debugging of both server side and client side code (GWT on client, something REST full on the server side) with IntelliJ Java debuggers open on both client and server code - hopefully you may only need this once a month but useful when you need it. Repl based development with a smart IDE (like Clojure in IntelliJ or Ruby in RubyMine). Interactive Scala worksheets in the Eclipse/ScalaIDE (sort of like Chris's Light Table).
In addition to a lot of NLP work on my 1108, I was also just getting into neural networks back then and my NN simulations ran like mollasses on the 1108. Any of my laptops are many orders of magnitude faster for just about anything I do than my 1108.