<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Apr 24, 2009, at 2:31 AM, Leslie P. Polzer wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 12:53:51AM -0600, Alexander Repenning wrote:<br><br><blockquote type="cite">A: Oh well, that is just how things are, Now we need to built the IDE.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">N: built the IDE ? Huhh, why?<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">A: Oh well, that is just how things are<br></blockquote><br>I'm not sure how it is with the CCL Cocoa interface or CCL on Mac in<br>general, but isn't the IDE a non-essential gimmick?<br><br>Rather like "No, we don't need to build it actually, but see here CCL<br>gives us this cool matching IDE for free!".<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I hope this is just flame bait... OK, I bite</div><div><br></div><div>I can see that for some experienced Lisp users perhaps the command line or SLIME may be fine but this simply does not work to attract new programmers at any meaningful level. CS students are used to Visual Studio and Eclipse these days. They would not even call the CCL IDE an IDE. There is something to be said for a simple IDE such as the one MCL supported. I have successfully gotten students interested in that one but I have NEVER seen a student getting into Lisp via command line/SLIME kinds of interfaces. Even most browsers, e.g., Safari, have built in IDEs with JavaScript REPL, breakpoints, object inspectors.</div><div><br></div><div>If an IDE a non-essential gimmick why do you even use SLIME? Why not program with punch cards. I am not even sure where all this back to the basics comes from. Certainly not from Lisp. Lisp actually invented many of the great IDE concepts. Remember the Symbolics? What is this race to the bottom all about?</div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><br><br><blockquote type="cite">I go to the example folder and pick them randomly, really.<br></blockquote><br>Your criticism of the state of the demos may be valid or not (I haven't<br>tried them), but I think you should have prepared your demo better.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div>I could have shown a nice Lisp demo on my machine but that was not the point.<br><blockquote type="cite"><div><br>Lisp communities are small and most projects often don't have enough<br>man-power (and/or varied system environments exposure) to keep all<br>aspects of their software in good shape, so it should become second<br>nature to prepare and double-check a demo before showing it to someone.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Ask yourself: WHY are the Lisp communities so small? It is because Lisp has gotten a bad reputation suggesting that it is hard to use. </div><div><br></div><div>It may be some work to fix a non working example to be sure but I would claim it is better to hide broken stuff from new users.</div><div><br></div><div>alex</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><br> Leslie<br>_______________________________________________<br>Openmcl-devel mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Openmcl-devel@clozure.com">Openmcl-devel@clozure.com</a><br>http://clozure.com/mailman/listinfo/openmcl-devel<br><br></div></blockquote></div><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Prof. Alexander Repenning</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px">University of Colorado</p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px">Computer Science Department</p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px">Boulder, CO 80309-430</p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">vCard: <a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf">http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf</a></font></p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div> </div><br></body></html>