Lisp Xperts' BOF

[Kerry Kimbrough <Kimbrough@dsg.csc.ti.com>]

On Jan 24, during the X Technical Conference at MIT, about 48 persons met in a
birds-of-a-feather session for people interested in Lisp X programming tools --
CLX, CLUE, and (by indirection) CLOS.  A show of hands indicated that the
participants were divided roughly equally between those who were currently using
CLX and those who were interested but inexperienced.  CLX users were further
split approximately equally between application programmers and toolkit
programmers.  Almost no one present was currently using CLUE.

Someone asked if CLX was an X Consortium standard.  Not quite, explained LaMott
Oren.  According to LaMott, the main obstacle remaining is the lack of
documentation, but Mike Myjak of TI is now working to remedy this problem.  The
latest version of Myjak's CLX manual should be available soon via anonymous FTP.

I spoke for a few minutes to outline some of the future plans for CLUE.  The
next available version of CLUE should appear in Q2.  New features will include
shell contacts, constraint resources, contact reparenting, and defaction
cleanup.  In Q3, CLUE 2.01 will introduce built-in contact classes which
implement a CL binding for the Consortium-standard "core components".  Suzanne
McBride, who is currently working on the implementation of CLUE core components,
gave a brief overview of this Consortium project.

BOF participants received a survey form asking about their usage of CLX, CLUE,
and CLOS. Response to the survey was very light -- about 20% -- but the results
are shown below.


CLX -------------------------------------------------------------------------

Responding:			10
Currently using:		5
Currently planning to use:	4
Currently planning to implement (!!): 1 

Which implementation:
	R3			4
	R2			2
			
Which Common Lisp:
	Lucid			4
	KCL			1
	Franz Allegro 3.0	1
	CMU Common Lisp		1
	Vax Lisp		1
	Sun Common Lisp		1

Which computer:
	Sun 3			4
	Sun 4			3
	HP 9000/350		2
	IBM PC/RT		1
	Apollo			1
	Vax			1

Things I like:
	Easy
	Availability
	Reliable
	Good interface

Things I want fixed:
	Event processing: need more raw events
	Better documentation (4)
	wm-hints: use atoms/strings, etc.
	Multitasking bugs: process locking missing in some places
	Annoyance: multiple layers of macros make source hard to
		understand/debug
	event-case :discard-p should default to T


CLUE ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Responding:			4
Currently using:		0
Currently planning to use:	4

Which implementation:
	TI public		1
			
Which Common Lisp:
	Lucid			2
	Vax Lisp		1
	Sun Common Lisp		1

Which computer:
	Sun 3			1
	Sun 4			2
	Apollo			1
	Vax			1

Things I like:

Things I want fixed:
	Better documentation
	


CLOS ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Responding:			5
Currently using:		2
Currently planning to use:	2
Have used:			1

Which implementation:	
	PCL			4
			
Which Common Lisp:
	Lucid			2
	Franz Allegro 3.0	1
	CMU Common Lisp		1
	Vax Lisp		1

Which computer:
	Sun 4			2
	Sun 3			1
	IBM PC/RT		1
	HP 9000/350		1
	Vax			1	

Things I like:
	Reasonable design
	Portable interface

Things I want fixed:
	Too slow		3