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From: uda@majestix.ida.liu.se (Ulf Dahlen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Unix Lisp Environments (why the slow evolution)
Message-ID: <1258@majestix.ida.liu.se>
Date: 8 May 89 20:30:19 GMT
References: <7802@zodiac.UUCP>
Organization: CIS Dept, Univ of Linkoping, Sweden
Lines: 36

In article <7802@zodiac.UUCP> jdye@ads.com (John W. Dye Jr.) writes:
>On the subject of Lisp Environments for Unix (SUN) workstations.
>
>As a former Lispm user who presently is a Sun common-lisp hacker
>I would like to make a few observations about the state and
>evolution of lisp environments for Unix workstations.  Hopefully
>these comments will spark constructive discussion about what
>we can do to speed the arrival of good lisp based programming environments.

There is very much of "religion" when it comes to programming languages.
Many people back off when they hear the word "Lisp", probably thinking
things like "slow", "parenthesis", "unreadable" and "toy-language".

At the same time, in the C, Ada, Pascal etc community, there is an
evolution towards incremental programming, interactive debugging,
incremental (re)compiling and so on. All these things that we Lisp machine
users have been working with for years. It often seems to me that there
are hundreds of developers reinventing the wheel here.

They say that the Lisp machine concept is dead. The phrase now is
"general all-purpose OS and workstations". Perhaps that is true, but
as a friend said the other day: "I'd rather develop my C-program in
Lisp first on a Lisp machine and then port it to a SUN when it's
fully debugged(!), than work directly with C and UNIX." Spare your
flames, I am not saying Lisp is better than C but that the programming
environment on a Lisp machine is superior to the "environment" on, say,
a SUN.

Just some idle thoughts...
__________
Ulf Dahlen
Dept of Computer & Info Science, University of Linkoping, Sweden
Troskaregatan 51:23       |     uda@ida.liu.se
S-583 30  LINKOPING       |     uda@majestix.liu.se, uda@liuida.UUCP
SWEDEN                    |     {mcvax,munnari,seismo}!enea!liuida!uda
"The beginning is a very delicate time."