Re: contents of clim-library as of 92/09/09

[Vincent Keunen <nrb!keunen@relay.EU.net>]

    Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 17:12+0200
    From: Scott McKay <SWM@stony-brook.scrc.symbolics.com>

	Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 02:09 EDT
	From: "John C. Mallery" <jcma@reagan.ai.mit.edu>

	How come there is almost nothing in the library?  Nobody uses CLIM?  Nobody
	writes application independent code?  It's all a trade secret headed for the
	patent office?

    I would also like to know the answers to these questions...  In my
    opinion, a major reason for the success of X Windows is the sheer extent
    of the stuff publicly available for X Windows.  I don't think CLIM can
    be successful without a similar effort.  Of course, CLIM itself may be
    too immature or limited to support such an effort.  I don't know, but I
    would like to.


I am personnaly afraid of the future of CLIM.  I would *love* it to
become *soon* the agreed upon standard.  I mean agreed upon by lisp
PROGRAMMERS, not lisp providers.

Aside the fact that there are different compilers, I see the lisp market
divided in two main categories:

  workstations / pcs, ie
   unix        / mac and windows and...

(I'm not sure where the symbolics lie, especially with a MacIvory...)

Although traditionnally lisp has been on bigger machines (because its
need for resources), it is now moving down to smaller machines (see MCL,
see Procyon, see Allegro, see ...).  And vendors seem to realize that
it's an important part of the business too (even if it's not the
biggest)...  Lucid is going to distribute MCL, Franz has acquired the
rights to Procyon CL on windows,...

And this market has a *big* advantage: machines being smaller and
products being cheaper, lots of people can afford one.  So a lot more
people can play with these lisps, and contribute their extensions.

Just by curiosity, the next time you connect to the clim-library, take a
"cd .." and look at the contributed code for MCL...  Compared to CLIM,
it's huge...

And MCL runs on only one machine, it's just one CL and its
extensions won't port easily...

Compare this to CLIM that runs on lots of compilers on lots of
machines...

Having CLIM 2.0 run on MCL (AND LOOK LIKE THE MAC ON THE MAC), I am sure
it could help making CLIM accepted by MCL programmers, and therefore
have a large community contribute to this standard.  For the moment,
MCLers look at the clim demo and immediately throw it away because "it
has nothing to do with the mac".  And they are not totally wrong.  And
they won't look at it a second time.  So it's urgent to change this.

I know clim has lots of deep things, but unfortunately, these don't
appear at first sight.  So the "surface" must be attractive as well.

I am not saying this to promote MCL, but to promote CLIM.

I put the clim-library on the same server as the MCL-library for a good
reason... ;-)

Vincent
--

Keunen Vincent                  Network Research Belgium
R&D, Software Engineer          Parc Industriel des Hauts-Sarts
keunen@nrb.be                   2e Avenue, 65
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