Dylan rather than CL -- why?

[brent@amber.ssd.csd.harris.com (Brent W. Benson)]

fhd@panix.com (Frank Deutschmann) writes:

> 3) Why seperate the developmet environment from the language?

Here are two reasons I feel are important, one of which you
mentioned.

	o delivery - you don't want to deliver the environment.  At
	some point you need to deliver an application and make the
	break between environment and language.  Why not specify that
	break up front?  While some Lisp systems provide ways to trim
	down a Lisp image, it's not the same as producing a .o file
	that can be linked with other languages that follow certain
	conventions.

	o flexibility - it's not clear that the same development
	environment will work on every machine that one might program
	in Dylan.  Requiring a certain type of environment might
	restrict the spread of the language (sounds like a virus or
	something :-).

I would highly recommend the article "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How
to Win Big" by Richard Gabriel of Lucid.  It's available in LaTeX form
by anonymous ftp from bongo.garnet.cs.cmu.edu in /pub/good-bad-win.
He talks about "the right thing" approach to designing systems.  This
might correspond to producing the best possible Dylan with a perfect
integrated environment.  This project takes years to complete, but is
wonderful when it is done.  The other approach is "worse is better."
This corresponds to providing a Dylan that is easy to implement, is
flexible, and works well with other languages.  Not quite as
satisfying, but it's out there and people are using it to solve real
problems.  He ends up describing a next-generation Lisp that is very
close to Dylan.  Great article.

Brent Benson                     
Harris Computer Systems