[info-mcl] MCL Past vs. Future

[Christopher Eliot]

I don't particularly like Eclipse either, although I'm getting used  
to it. You can fake it out with new Run Configurations to implement  
throw away applications without much trouble. Control click on a Run  
Configuration to make a duplicate. I think your complaint that it has  
too strong an idea about how things should be done is just right; the  
different views and perspectives aren't really worth the bother.  
Software that can't read my mind - perfectly - should not try to  
second guess my intentions.

On very rare occasions I even use some of the refactoring tools.

There is nothing about Java that requires a great deal of setup; all  
you need is a main method.


On Oct 16, 2007, at 6:21 PM, Pascal Costanza wrote:

>
> On 16 Oct 2007, at 23:39, Andrew Shalit wrote:
>
>> On Oct 16, 2007, at 5:33 PM, Pascal Costanza wrote:
>>
>>> Personally, I think that Eclipse sucks big time. But that's just a
>>> personal opinion.
>>
>> What sucks about it? We're dealing with 100% personal opinion here.
>
> Hard to tell. But what annoys me mostly is that Eclipse has very
> strong ideas about how things should be done, and doesn't let me do
> things my way. It is also too much project-oriented - you have to do
> too much configuration before you can write your first line of code,
> and this is every time you want to write some programs.
>
> Maybe that's not a big issue for commercial software development, but
> in my case, I need to be able to write throwaway programs, just to be
> able to try out ideas, and I want to be able to get as fast from idea
> to code as possible. In Eclipse, this generally takes too long, as
> far as I can tell.
>
> But then again, this is also a problem which is, to a certain degree,
> inherently connected to Java. But, as a counter example, NetBeans was
> much more flexible in my experience, the last time I checked it.
>
> Nowadays, I just use emacs / Aquamacs for experiments with Java.
> Since I don't do a lot with Java anymore, that's mostly sufficient.
> It'd be nice to have something better than emacs for Common Lisp,
> though. LispWorks is currently fine for me.
>
> However, there are two issues that concern me:
>
> (1) I typically develop my libraries in LispWorks first, and then
> regularly check them on several CL implementations. It's a pity that
> I have to do these checks outside of LispWorks, and it is especially
> a pity that every CL implementations has slightly different boundary
> conditions that restrict how test suites can be automated.
>
> It would be great if there were a CL environment from which I could
> use several CL implementations. I don't like SLIME in that regard, it
> should indeed be a "real" development environment, with
> straightforward support for switching the underlying CL
> implementation on the go.
>
>
> (2) There should be a CL implementation (and a related GUI library)
> that takes as much advantage of Mac OS X as possible. Cross-platform
> libraries already exist, but tightly integrated libraries +
> development environment are missing. I think there is a real gap
> there, which should be filled IMHO.
>
> (Yes, I understand that previous MCL users with considerable amount
> of code who want it to just work on new Mac machines have slightly
> different concerns here...)
>
>
> Pascal
>
> -- 
> Pascal Costanza, mailto:pc at p-cos.net, http://p-cos.net
> Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Programming Technology Lab
> Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium
>
>
>
>
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