[info-mcl] digitool (MCL) / clozure (OpenMCL)

Thu Oct 4 08:46:38 EDT 2007

A note from the northern corner of the Lisp world:

  I've been teaching a Functional Programming course for several  
years; it's really a Lisp course!  We used Allegro and Winston's book  
for several years, with a focus on AI applications, then we
went over to Scheme (and the SICP text) for a few years.  This year,  
I got all fired up about Peter Seibel's book (Practical Common Lisp) and
went back to good old CL.  His SLIME environment is fine for teaching  
purposes.  Some of the students use it, while others just
use emacs and one or another of the free CL's out there.

The focus of the course is moving back toward AI applications.  In  
general, the "coolness" of AI stuff has nothing to do with graphics, so
I'm quite happy to run basic CL and CLOS for this course.  Hence, I  
hope to be able to keep "spreading the joy" of Lisp for years to
come.  Some nice GUI's would be nice, of course, but...

... Keith Downing
     NTNU
     Trondheim, Norway

p.s. I'm another one of those people who has a fancy new (getting  
older) Intel Mac just sitting around gathering dust.  I'll probably  
move to
SBCL as soon as I find some spare time.

On Oct 4, 2007, at 2:20 PM, Lee Spector wrote:

>
> At least in my little corner of academia the influx is tapering off,
> because although I have the freedom to keep teaching in Lisp the
> available tools just don't measure up. I frequently mutter something
> like "of course this is handled much better in Lisp" in class, but
> meanwhile I'm teaching other languages. None of them has a
> development environment half as good as MCL, but MCL doesn't even run
> on our machines so that hardly matters. Some of my students are
> programming in C, some in Python, some in Java, and I'm teaching
> classes using Processing (a pretty nifty Java environment for art-
> related projects) and the breve simulation environment (plug: this is
> a product of one of my former students, see http://www.spiderland.org/
> breve), among other things. All of these are inferior to MCL in many
> ways but they run on our machines and they integrate with modern
> systems and the web in ways that none of the current Lisps seem to.
>
> Just another depressing data point, I guess. But if the right new
> Lisp environment came along I'd happily switch back to Lisp for most
> of my teaching.
>
>   -Lee
>
>
>
>
> On Oct 4, 2007, at 1:17 AM, Marco Antoniotti wrote:
>
>>
>> On Oct 4, 2007, at 06:30 , Henry Lieberman wrote:
>>
>>> Mark,
>>>
>>> I don't know the absolute numbers, but my guess is that the Lisp
>>> community as a whole has been roughly stable due to two factors:
>>> (1) an outflux of Lisp users who get guns put to their head forcing
>>> them to stop using Lisp, and (2) an influx of young people who get
>>> introduced to it by old farts like you and me, then come back with,
>>> "Holy shit, how come nobody else told me about this before!?" :-)
>>
>> Well, some of the "old farts" now wield considerable power to brain-
>> wash/enlighten the young masses :)  I am teaching a course on
>> (Common) Lisp this quarter!  :)  I'm having a ball.
>>
>> Having said that, I think that MCL on the Mac was an unsurpassed
>> example of integration.  However,  I grew fond of CAPI and LW over
>> the years and I believe that, given all the bells and whistles that
>> better Cocoa integration would yield, thinking about cloning CAPI
>> would not be such a bad idea.
>>
>> My 0.014113 cents.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Marco
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Henry
>>>
>>>
>>> On 10/3/07, Mark D Gross <mdgross at cmu.edu> wrote: hi,
>>>
>>> I've been watching this train wreck for a (loooong) while, hoping
>>> against hope that it would right itself before running entirely off
>>> the
>>> rails.
>>> Having known many of the various principals for a long time, I've
>>> been
>>> really sorry to see the gradual demise of MCL and hoping that
>>> somehow a
>>> phoenix will arise from the ashes. An MCL(like) development
>>> environment
>>> (Fred, inspector, stepper, etc.) and the GUI and other environment
>>> calls
>>> make a real difference to me, as (sadly) being a professor doesn't
>>> seem
>>> to leave large amounts of time for low level hacking.  But I still
>>> like
>>> to build stuff.  So I've been happy to see a few glimmers of hope
>>> in the
>>> discussion lately.
>>>
>>> So - a question that may be naive - how big is this community these
>>> days?  How many people are still out there (like me) lurking and
>>> hoping
>>> for a quick resolution to an MCL-like environment on an Intel 2
>>> machine?  (The longer this goes on the fewer people will be left to
>>> care).  So what' s the order of magnitude? 10? 100?  1000?  Does
>>> anyone
>>> know?
>>>
>>> Mark
>>>
>>> --
>>> Mark D Gross
>>> Professor, Computational Design
>>> Carnegie Mellon University
>>> http://code.arc.cmu.edu
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
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>>
>> --
>> Marco Antoniotti
>>
>>
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>
> --
> Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science
> School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College
> 893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002-3359
> lspector at hampshire.edu, http://hampshire.edu/lspector/
> Phone: 413-559-5352, Fax: 413-559-5438
>
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