Re: Community of MCL Practice: combining MCL and Mosaic

[joswig@vampire.lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig)]

Hello,

>community is gaining new momentum - trough the promise of the PowerPC
>version of MCL- I wonder if people have any insight why this community
>is working? What is good about it, what is bad about, how could it be
>improved?

It is nice to see that now, as the future of MCL seems to brighten up,
users are coming back.

There are several reasons why there is this user community. Some:
- MCL is a powerful development environment, yet easy to use and
  runs on low cost computers
- MCL is compatible with other implementations (as Common Lisp code is
  portable)
- MCL is used by many researchers and developers who have Internet access
  (so this is also an Internet success story) and are willing to
  share code and to provide help
- code sharing is relatively easy (you can load all sorts of weird stuff
  into MCL)
- support from Apple (and now from Digitool)
  (ftp server, www server, mailing lists, manpower, CD-ROM, ...)

>I wonder if people have any ideas how the community could be improved?
>For instance, what kind of interesting things could we do with Mosaic
>that are hard or even impossible to do with the current FTP approach to
>create a community repository?

I would like to see:

- a WWW accessible archive with descriptions of the software
- MCL documentation additionally available in HTML format
- ANSI CL docs in HTML format
- direct access from MCL to the HTML version of the docs (online or local)
- HTML formatting routines for MCL


But what I wanted to suggest for some time:


How about a _user_contributed_online_active_book_ about MCL. The idea is
to have some authors who would like to write about MCL (or CL)
related topics and publish these articles through the web.

(At MIT they have an CLIM-and-Lispm-based WWW-server which may be
ported to MCL (as I read). How about combining it with a MCL-based client?
What would this do for us?)

I have seen some _very_good_code_ from people using MCL. How about
telling us how they develop?

It could even be possible to browse through the source code (lisp2html)
and even execute examples.

Topics could be:
- Learning Lisp
- Learning Common Lisp
- Learning CLOS
- Learning MCL
- Programming Paradigms
- Graphics in MCL
- MCL multimedia programming
- MCL and other Macintosh applications
- Communications programming (serial interfaces, TCP/IP, ...)
- Porting software to MCL
- Performance tuning
- Common Lisp coding styles
- Source code control
- Your MCL application
- A list (and reviews?) of all the software able to work with MCL
  or specially designed to work with MCL
- Commercial software using MCL
...

Would there be sufficient interest in participating in such an effort?
This would be largely user driven. So it is up to us. It is nice to see
all these interesting things that can be done or have be done with MCL.
But we have to increase visibility. Let people get access to the ideas.

What do you think?

Rainer Joswig