Re: Request for comments: project proposal

Hello,

Luke Gorrie writes:
 > 
 > I'm itching to have a McCLIM-based program that I can use in daily
 > life, so this is very interesting.

Thanks. 

 > An email client seems a bit thorny though:
 > 
 >   Gnus is already quite fantastic, and Emacs is a great vehicle for
 >   mail. (I think Gnus is much more popular for mail than VM these
 >   days, but I could be mistaken.)

You might be right.  Though I suppose Gnus would have some of the same
problems I indicated with vm (loading and saving files, duplicating
messages, hard to grep). 

 >   Email is "mission critical" -- it would be quite aggravating to
 >   lose access to my mail during times of program-under-development
 >   bugs.

Of course.  

 >   Email is heavily stateful. If Mel has all my mail in its Lisp image
 >   but isn't working, I can't easily fall back and read my mail in
 >   Gnus instead.

Well, I am not convinced this is a good argument.  I mean, the purpose
would be to make it as reliable as the Unix file system.  

 > How about throwing the weight behind Gilbert's Closure browser
 > instead? The weaknesses of mail seem to be strengths of the web:
 > 
 >   No full-featured browser will be written in Elisp for at least ten
 >   years, say. Probably never.
 > 
 >   None of the full-featured browsers have "Emacs nature", nor do they
 >   seem likely to get it.
 > 
 >   The client web is quite stateless -- if one browser isn't working I
 >   can happily fall back on another for a few days or for some specific
 >   pages.
 > 
 > Closure is also in a pretty amazingly advanced state.
 > 
 > Just a thought.

I see your point.  I'll think about it. 

-- 
Robert Strandh

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C
or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden
slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
---------------------------------------------------------------------