Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Unix Lisp Environments (why the slow evolution)
Message-ID: <469@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 24 May 89 14:28:23 GMT
References: <31670@sri-unix.SRI.COM>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 18

In article <31670@sri-unix.SRI.COM> roberts@studguppy.lanl.gov (Doug Roberts) writes:
>I did receive an interesting comment to my suggestion that they should try
>to emulate the functionality of Symbolics' window debugger in their lisp
>environment. The comment was something like" "Groan... Just what we 
>need... To make our product more Symbolics-like." 

I guess some of the Unix Lisp vendors are under commercial pressure to
make Lisp fit better with conventional languages and conventional ways
of doing things rather than make systems for Lisp hackers (such hackers
being in limited supply).  There is often also a strong negative reaction
to Lisp systems that are many megabytes in size.  To some extent this is
unfair, because calculations of the size of C systems tend to omit all
the things C gets "free" from Unix, but it is not completely unfair.

Lisp often ends up in competition with C.  People disagree about the
best way to compete (become more C-like?  less C-like?), but it has
proved difficult to convert the world to Lisp-like ways of thinking.
And so the "don't be like Symbolics" approach has its attractions.