Re: RMCL 5.2.1 Official

On Nov 15, 2009, at 2:06 PM, Alexander Repenning wrote:
> 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 see it as a goal that MCLIDE remains highly targeted to the  
Macintosh platform and everything it offers, rather than spread the  
effort to be everything for everybody. MCLIDE already lets Lisp  
developers use their Mac when working on remote implementations  
whether on the same or on other platforms, all from one common,  
mature IDE all on this list are very familiar with.

> 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.

SLIME and Emacs are not for everybody. However, SLIME has  
demonstrated the benefits of separating the IDE from the lisp  
implementation. MCLIDE is thus a stand-alone application that  
piggybacks on the server part of SLIME ("Swank") and uses the same  
communication protocol to communicate with different lisp  
implementations. It provides the full IDE/GUI of MCL targeting other  
lisps - equally excellent everywhere ;-)

> 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.

The MCLIDE effort involves connecting existing IDE functionality with  
remote lisp implementations. I see MCLIDE as complementary to the  
development of an IDE on CCL, and likely also to your Cocotron based  
toolkit project. MCLIDE as is provides an excellent environment to  
prototype and play with ideas for a Lisp IDE of the future.

I would like to "mclidify" CCL when Clozure has completed their  
funded IDE project, and have notified them about my intentions.  
Essential parts of MCLIDE already run under CCL. But so far building  
it on CCL (including the new 1.4 version) would be limited compared  
to the fully featured lisp IDE now provided by MCLIDE.

-- Terje Norderhaug

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