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A few more cents
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 92 09:23:48 -0700
From: Richard Weyhrauch <rww@ibuki.com>
IBUKI as you all know has explicitly chosen NOT to provide CLIM to its
customers. We believe that the Lisp vendors have NO business trying to
duplicate all the 100s of man years that the larger community has put
into UIs. In our view not even a consortium of Lisp vendors can afford
to duplicate this effort. What we as vendors should be doing is to make
it easier for our users to take advantage of the other commercial UIs.
I'll point out that CLIM is not intended as a replacement or
competitor to existing window systems. It instead is a Lisp interface
layer on top of them. We certainly didn't want to write a new window
system, and we have no code that implements graphics rendering or
window creation or clipping or... CLIM does include stuff that isn't
directly an interface to the underlying window system (e.g. output
recording and presentations). One can argue that building that stuff
was a mistake, and that we should have stuck to the minimal possible
portable Lisp UI toolkit, but we included it for several reasons: 1)
we believe in the usefulness and the power of the added technology, 2)
helping Lisp programmers port applications developed under Genera to
other platforms was a major component of our marketing strategy.
The CLIM protocols are designed so that you can leave out all the
higher-level stuff if all you really want is a Lisp interface to
windowing and graphics. Unfortunately, the existing CLIM
implementations haven't quite lived up to the promise, a flaw I hope
to see corrected in CLIM 2.
0,,
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