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From: shebs@utah-orion.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: A Decent Environment. Where is it? (some flame, some advice)
Message-ID: <178@utah-orion.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Nov-87 19:33:12 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-ori.178
Posted: Mon Nov  9 19:33:12 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Nov-87 20:45:39 EST
References: <21493@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <2630001@hpfcmp.HP.COM> <177@utah-orion.UUCP> <12076@beta.UUCP>
Reply-To: shebs@orion.utah.edu.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs)
Organization: PASS Research Group
Lines: 44

In article <12076@beta.UUCP> dzzr@beta.UUCP (Douglas J Roberts) writes:

>HA! The 15 or so of us in my group who have experimented with Knowledge
>Engineering Environment (KEE) and LISP running on a SUN would *swear*
>that UNIX folks had never heard of software development tools!

This is a very puzzling remark.  Unix systems were the first to exploit
the idea of using tools instead of big, fancy, and inflexible systems
(recent years have seen a proliferation of such systems in Unix, though).
Perhaps there's a misconception - when I say "tool", I have in mind the
software equivalents of hammers and screwdrivers and bench saws.  Sure,
three-story-high milling machines are amazing creations, but everything
they do has to be cast in terms of milling (for instance, cutting = engraving
a channel so deep it goes all the way through), and they are totally useless
for anything that the milling machine designers did not think of already.

Getting back to software, there is *no* programming environment designer
clever enough to anticipate what I want to do.  They're better off supplying
a set of simpler tools that can fit together in different ways.  In Unix,
the interface is a character stream, which is good for text and general file
processing, but bad for Lisp.  A tool-oriented Lisp environment would
presumably use S-expressions as the basic interface, although one would
probably need some sort of lazy version, so that heap space isn't exhausted
by the creation of one intermediate object.  Useful operations include
many already in Common Lisp, such as sorting, set operations, and reversing,
but extended to operate on incompletely-defined things.  Generalization of
streams is a good thing as well.  (For some more ideas like this, see the
Fraser/Hanson paper on the EZ programming environment in POPL 85.)

A classic example of tool usage in Unix is the one-line spelling checker;
I have yet to see any Lisp programming environment support anything quite
as elegant and useful.

There is actually an interesting research question here: integration vs tools.
Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, and nobody really
knows enough about programming environments to say which is better, and under
what conditions.  Unfortunately, doing believable experiments on this sort of
question involves a horrendous amount of work...

>			Doug Roberts
>			dzzr@lanl.gov

							stan shebs
							shebs@cs.utah.edu