Re: What are current plans for RMCL?

Pascal, probably for the reasons you allude to, I've always tended to 
find ASDF a bit of a struggle. But I've not yet attuned myself fully 
to the opensource plug&play software culture.

Re. RMCL (which from me had moved on to MCL6), I think the writing 
was on the wall in many dimensions from way back.  Carbon's obviously 
of a bygone era, now snuffed out by Apple (Lion, Rosetta etc).

I just had a struggle with trying to get Snow Leopard Server (SLS) 
running through VMWare Fusion on a Lion Mac Mini Server, and failed. 
This with a view to bridging a port of a MCL app to the next viable 
lisp.  I failed.  This was not helped by the pathetic documentation 
for Fusion (which is PC/Wintel orientated) and Apple, who seem to 
have done nothing to help us do this.  They have relaxed some 
licensing rules, but in so many ways have either deliberately or 
mindlessly made things bloody awkward.  In this area I think we're 
climbing over years of Apple's efforts to prevent any use of MacOS X 
on non Apple hardware. So now despite trying to legitimately run SLS 
on Apple hardware, we have problems.

Meanwhile we can easily get SLS or SL to run on an AMD Hackintosh 
etc.  But if you want to stay pukka and on-side with Apple, you've 
got problems if you need Rosetta.

Perhaps now is a decision point for any sad losers like me who still 
have legacy code and systems that depend upon Carbon (I speak as one 
with a 1983 3600 so I know all about albatrosses, and if you don't 
know what a 3600 is, thank your stars that you still have a hope). 

Scenario A: try to hunt out old SL supporting boxes (I could find 
only a few refurbs in the USA, none in Europe. Take a chance on eBay 
etc.  This is getting ever more remote from commercial viability, so 
surely any diehards must be classified as hobbyists or eccentric 
throwbacks.

Scenario B: get virtualization of SL going under Lion.  And please 
let us know exactly how to do it.

Scenario C: A quiet chalk line crossed was when Terje moved MCLIDE 
from Carbon to Cocoa.  For me he's a huge hero for any with MCL 
tainted blood in their veins.  And unlike Alice, whom I still 
venerate in a weird way (given that I never managed, despite many 
years of trying, to connect with her personally), Terje communicates 
brilliantly. In Terje's move, he went followed not just where 
Quckdraw morphed into Cocoa, but that colossus (and wonder of the 
lisp world) Byers at Clozure.

What does that mean for MCLers down on terra firma. Well goodbye to 
tons of what you know and love. Though evolving from MCL, the lisp 
sources share a lot.  Obviously your pure CL is safe and very happy. 
But reach out to do your display work, interfacing outside, then get 
your objective-C hat on (I haven't found mine yet).  It'll help if 
you have any Unixy-geek blood in you. The terminal's your friend.

Unlike Harlequin who cost real money and don't allow you sight of the 
sources, CLZ (aka CCL or Clozure Common Lisp) demands no money cost. 
It is red hot now lisp, runs like something flying off a hot shovel 
(native threads, so at last you can put your multi-core Intel chip to 
work).  CLZ runs on Windows c/o Cocotron so you might have 10x the 
market place for little extra investment of your design genius. 
Android possibilities are coming through. I fantasize of delivery on 
iOS of course - admit it, so do you. But that's still confined to the 
bedroom.

People like me (at heart a musician, a cellist, so I allow my 
subconscious to communicate with my fingers, leaving my mind free to 
think about design and my end users' living experience), a huge issue 
is losing Fred and replacing it with Hemlock.  For me this is moving 
from the sanity of the concert hall to a teenager's bedroom, my 
instincts clash with so much.

I am being far too un-geeky here, but in for a penny ... Another 
confession, I've a rotten gremlin (one of many) in my head, called 
dyslexia, which in writing prose makes everything a huge struggle, 
but in writing code can be dynamite - the bad sort.  But my darling 
Fred allowed me to use mouse-copy.  This has for decades been an 
absolute life saver for me.  If Clozure had mouse-copy, I'd long ago 
have let MCL slide into oblivion, and embraced that huge and steep 
learning curve of Hemlock and Cocoa.  Well I have been trying to do 
just that, but it has been snakes&ladders for me.  I, like many of my 
ilk, am not CS trained, I don't have Linux or C flowing in my veins. 
I don't do geek or formal methods, these tools (MCL etc) are just 
brushes, paint and canvas, my mind is in the end picture.

But there's no mouse-copy for CLZ. Blame me, I'm seemingly the only 
fool aching for it, and CLZ being quasi open, I should have 
written/contributed it.  I would if I thought I could.

I've been way to personal in this reply. But continuing, another 
thing that is way out of my comfort zone in the Clozure world is 
discussion lists culture.  The main one seems basically for the 
development of CLZ (I shouldn't use that term in public, as I've seen 
Gary B fume at the mention of it, perfectly suitable though it is). 
We CCL users are beta testers, and discussions that help fix CCL that 
are on topic, highly professional and perfectly relevant are well 
received.  But I've had my head chewed off viciously more than once 
(usually by college grad types) for not behaving in true geek 
autistic style.

Over the years, the info-mcl list has been a great boon to me and 
many like me. A human face when the ingenue can timidly seek and gain 
encouragement, and not expect the know-it-all (who knows a little 
about code and nothing of social grace) to dump on them.

What I mean is that the community of users may matter to you. If you 
are a regular CS type, most of what I'm trying to say will be Greek 
to you and you'll fit in with CCL easily.  However, over the decades 
I've known some superb minds that found MCL (and before it Zetalisp) 
allowed them the means to make real their dreams and think-different 
designs. These have been sometimes been mould makers rather than 
moulded minds.  For them, often extremely clever folk, the CS culture 
can be harsh to the point of being toxic and intolerable.  This can 
be quite strong in the CCL world. So before jumping in the deep end 
there, it might be worth considering whether you can take the heat. 
Most there don't mince words.

Maybe RMCL or what next, might be answered by asking yourself if you 
are trying to design and make something, or whether trying to 
assemble Leggo parts to make something Ikea.  If you expect to start 
with a clean slate and a head full of ideas, your path may be 
different than if Quicklisp gets you most of the way to where you 
need to go.

There are of course other lisps to explore. ECL for your iOS dreams. 
SBCL. Clojure, Python, ... In everything, we may be safest to stay 
with the herd. Share the headaches and glean crumbs from the table of 
the gurus.

But for RMCL, I think the hooddy with the scythe has been tugging at 
the curtain for a long time. The rats (and smart folk) have long left 
the ship. Lion and future cats will have no place for it. Everything 
is shrinking inside the walled garden, a gadget world, shiny in 
pockets, kindergartens and dainty handbags. Old fogey code doesn't 
belong there. And crying that your realtime genome vizualizer is not 
like another iFart app, won't buy to any hearing.

Another question to ponder is, coming from RMCL hence the Mac world, 
do you want to move into the OSX world which has a slow-mo vice 
closing around it. This is not the free world of 1984, but the steel 
hard world of borg ruthless control which is the mega corporation 
Apple. It is the pinnacle of unilateralism and dictatorship, and lisp 
in their world is some sort of maverik.  Despite what SK8 did for 
Apple seemingly so recently, any from Apple of that era must long 
have retired as the super rich. Modern generations probably think you 
have a speech impediment.  You are on your own with Apple, and I 
can't see anyone jumping through the sandboxes and app store 
scrutineer, so just what are you going to deliver your work on. The 
desktop model is sliding fast into history.  And some things just 
don't squeeze into the client/server model.  Even Cl-HTTP for MCL 
died with Alice's unicode update.

For myself (hair long gone, teeth turned to chalk) I want to love 
CCL, but struggle with their apparent insensitivity to the 
developer's UX. But there are many bonuses too. A major league 
consultancy help to fall back on, bleeding edge code as far as lisp 
goes, a pandora's box of code to explore, fantastic leg-up help from 
the likes of Paul Krueger for your Cocoa visions.

But back to Pascal's question. I don't know where RMCL stands, 
whether anyone's here, whether Pascal and I are talking to echoes.

My hope is to run with Terje, to CCL, and hoping we collectively 
manage to morph some of Fred to Hemlock (even better, all of Fred to 
CCL).  CCL is a commercial world, and if you want help of any sort 
you are likely to have to pay for it. Clozure the company is not a 
charity.

Come what may, I do hope the info-mcl list continues so there's a 
sane and safe place to discuss both maintenance of MCL built systems 
and migration issues.

-peter

At 3:02 PM +0200 12/4/11, Pascal Costanza wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I'd like to get an idea what the current plans for RMCL are, if any. 
>Since the switch to OS X 10.7, there is no default support for old 
>PowerPC applications on OS X anymore, so RMCL doesn't work anymore, 
>at least not without a major effort. Are there any plans to find a 
>remedy for this situation? Or will RMCL effectively become 
>deprecated?
>
>I'm asking for the following reasons: When ASDF was changed from 1.x 
>to 2.x, this caused some problems for RMCL, which I eventually 
>resolved by using Common Lisp's logical pathnames for the systems I 
>maintain (primarily Closer to MOP and ContextL). However, the 
>current maintainers of ASDF have an unjustified very low regard for 
>logical pathnames, which causes a lot of pain - basically, whenever 
>a new version of a Common Lisp implementation comes bundled with a 
>new ASDF version, I have to deal with bugs in ASDF that in one way 
>or the other break my setup with logical pathnames.
>
>Since my time is limited and is better served on things other than 
>producing bug reports for ASDF (which is a tool that should be much 
>more stable than it currently is), I decided now that it is better 
>to drop logical pathnames and go for the Unix-like names that the 
>ASDF maintainers seem to strongly prefer. RMCL would be the only 
>Common Lisp implementation that would cause a problem in this regard.
>
>So, what's the verdict?
>
>
>Thanks a lot for any hints!
>
>Best,
>Pascal
>
>--
>Pascal Costanza
>The views expressed in this email are my own, and not those of my employer.
>
>
>
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