[info-mcl] MCL Past vs. Future

[Raffael Cavallaro]

On Oct 16, 2007, at 11:01 AM, Alexander Repenning wrote:

> Looking at the screen  dump I am thinking this already looks much  
> more feature complete than the current Hemlock OpenMCL wrapper.  
> Follow some of the tutorials and study the number of tools for Lisp  
> in Eclipse. Syntax  coloring, symbol completion, project management,  
> REPL, file browsers, CVS, SVN support, ....   I'd say this is much  
> more relevant to the future of Lisp than say wrapping up an API such  
> as Cocoa (which btw MCL 5.2 can access too).


I've refrained from replying to your most recent posts in the hope  
that you would end this discussion but this last exercise in denial I  
cannot allow to stand.

Apple, the platform owner, has clearly both repeatedly *said* Cocoa is  
the future of the platform, and *demonstrated* it is the future of the  
platform by:
1. releasing new frameworks with Cocoa-only APIs
2. un-supporting 64-bit Carbon.

To say that an interface to a particular editor is more important to  
lisp on Mac OS X than a Cocoa bridge is, at best, wishful thinking.  
Really, it is more like a willful denial of reality.

Interfacing to Cocoa is the sine qua non of modern Mac OS X  
development. *Being* a Cocoa application is the only path to the  
future of 64-bit GUI applications as Apple are not moving Carbon GUI  
APIs to 64-bit.

"Fundamentally, Apple engineering is focused on Cocoa much more than  
Carbon, and Apple's engineering management made the decision to un- 
support 64-bit Carbon to emphasize that fact." - Eric Schlegel, Apple

from: <http://www.carbondev.com/site/?page=64-bit+Carbon>

Cocoa, to anyone whose vision is not clouded by mounds of legacy  
Carbon code, is the clear future of Mac OS X development. As such, a  
bridge to it is far more important to lisp on Mac OS X than an  
interface to any editor, no matter how colorful. Legacy code will just  
have to be ported - it really is that simple.


regards,

Ralph


Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D.
raffaelcavallaro at mac.com