Re: RMCL 5.2.1 Official

On Nov 15, 2009, at 6:53 AM, Glen Foy wrote:

> I hope we can encourage Terje to take this to the next level -- a generic Lisp IDE written in CCL -- possibly a generic Lisp IDE written in CCL using a cross-platform toolkit.  It would be a project that would catch the imagination of the entire Lisp community.  Slime tries to do this, but despite its numerous virtues, Slime just does not cut it with young programmers.  A project like MCLIDE would.  It would have a positive, possibly profound, impact on the entire language.
> 



I agree but would not spend too much effort on creating a fully generic IDE that can be connected with all kinds of Lisps such as SLIME. I know this is not a popular notion in the Lisp community but as Glen points out SLIME has not worked well to attract NEW Lisp users. In some sense SLIME is similar to Java SWING - equally terrible everywhere - kind of approach.  

MCL had /has a great IDE but in order to make a real dent to attach new users you need to be able to get it into ugrad education. For instance, using MCL as tool to explore computer graphics (OpenGL) worked very well but, and and this is a BIG but only in schools where ALL the students had Macs. I was lucky enough to teach such courses, e.g., at the University of Lugano where each student is given a Mac. To get a realistic chance of attracting new users and especially student one would need at Lisp with a IDE that:

- FOSS
- is cross platform: at least Mac and PC
- has built in cross platform support to to make GUIs
- has out of the box support for cross platform graphics (OpenGL)
- has a "good enough"  MCL-like IDE

I should not say too much but at least so far our experiments with Clozure CL, we are working together to create a cross platform toolkit based on Cocotron, are going pretty well. We have pretty complex GUIs working on Mac and PC now. 

Personally, I would wish that the MCLIDE effort would be more future oriented by putting the time into CCL to create a killer cross platform Common Lisp with  a nice IDE and some cross platform graphics.

Alex

Prof. Alexander Repenning

University of Colorado
Computer Science Department
Boulder, CO 80309-430

vCard: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf

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