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From: wnewman@netcom.com (Bill Newman)
Subject: Re: Common LISP: The Next Generation
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Date: Sat, 14 Sep 1996 12:19:11 GMT
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William A. Barnett-Lewis (wlewis@mailbag.com) wrote:
: In article <joswig-1209961856040001@news.lavielle.com>, joswig@lavielle.com 
: says...
: >
: >In article <842431349snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk>,
: >cyber_surfer@wildcard.demon.co.uk wrote:
: >
: >> In article <joswig-0809962225460001@news.lavielle.com>
: >>            joswig@lavielle.com "Rainer Joswig" writes:

: >>(refering to windows)
: >> platform I use, which supports the features I need,
: >
: >Which features do you need?
: >
: >What would you expect from a vendor? Be specific. Maybe if they
: >understand the demand they could target the market better.

: We have been specific in saying over and over. Those of us who have to program 
: for the PC  _need_ a truely windows aware Lisp: we need OCX capability, true 
: OLE compatability, dynamic linking to the system's DLLs, and for a price 
: somewhere low side of $500. Until this happens, Lisp will remain what it is:
: a very good language for building huge monolithic vertical apps on large 
: systems. And I'll still be stuck with Visual Basic because my wife and I happen 
: to like to eat evry day.

I'd like to chime in that those of us who program with free UNIX tools
program in g++ or Perl and tcl/Tk because of their virtues:
portability, solidity, and a rich set of primitives.  In C/C++, these
advantages are almost a given, but there's no fundamental reason why
Lisp can't be as good as tcl/Tk.  It just isn't, AFAIK.  There are
only so many programs which can be written using only Common Lisp or
Scheme/SLIB library functions.  Tcl/Tk and Perl are both pretty nasty
languages IMHO, but the implementatation is so good (and partly as a
consequence, they are so widely available) that I end up using them
regularly.

I last tried Scheme ports of the Tk toolkit (guile and STk) about a
year ago, and they were respectively unusable and usable but slightly
flaky.  tcl/Tk and Perl have been portable and solid and useful for a
long time.  Why is it hard to find their like in the Lisp world?  I
don't know how hard it is to create and support such a package, but
it's strange that people are motivated to do it outside the Lisp
world.  (I haven't tried scsh, maybe I should..)

It's IMHO a tragedy that John Ousterhout didn't use Scheme instead of
a warmed-over shell language as the basis of tcl.  I think the result
would probably have been even more successful than tcl/Tk: the
command-line syntax could be the same (by eliding the outer
parentheses if necessary), but the programming semantics would be
enormously improved.  With large programs in the native language a
practical proposition, who knows how far it could have gone?

If the functionality of Tk version 3.6 and/or Perl version 4.0.19
(i.e.  the versions documented in the Ousterhout and Wall/Schwartz
books) were available as libraries for a reasonably stable, friendly
free Common Lisp or Scheme or ML implementation (e.g. clisp, or scm if
it had a debugger, or perhaps smlnj) I think a *lot* of free lisp/ml
software would be written.  Until that occurs, large free programs
will by and large be written in C/C++, and smaller ones in Perl or
tcl/Tk.

  Bill Newman

PS. I haven't seen anything about guile on the Scheme newsgroup for a
while.  Does that mean that it's not going anywhere or that people
have decided that guile doesn't belong there?

PPS.  Perhaps I am excessively critical of STk.  It was a pretty
impressive package, and it is probably more impressive now.  However,
it did occasionally lock up in various odd ways on my plain vanilla
Linux machine.  (I've *never* had such a problem with tcl/Tk or Perl
-- they have always preserved the integrity of the interpreter no
matter what programming errors I made.)  It's also a little ugly the
way that it mechanically translates the syntax of the Tk interface
into Scheme, and unfortunate that it preserves the the man-page-based
tcl/Tk documentation (which is IMHO the worst implementation feature
of the tcl/Tk package).
