Symbolics & Sun-3 + Lucid Dev Envs

["Daniel L. Weinreb" <DLW@alderaan.scrc.symbolics.com>]

    Date: Tue, 26 May 87 17:13:25 CDT
    From: Rob Pettengill <rcp@MCC.COM>

    Communicating via emacs buffers / unix files works very well for ascii
    oriented data and operations such as compile-defun or
    edit-compiler-warnings.  

If all you're communicating is character data, then sure, files work
fine.  This is sort of like a version of Lisp in which all arguments
have to be character strings, and you can't pass Lisp objects back and
forth.

    Although no Common Lisp specification exists for it yet: A shared
    address space can provide a very flexible communication media for
    lightweight processes.  At least one Common Lisp vendor is already
    shipping a Beta test implementation (modeled on the lisp machine
    facility).  Hopefully we will see high quality implementations of this
    capability from most vendors within the next year.

Yes, slowly other Lisp environments are beginning to reach the point
where ours was in 1978.  I'm sure they'll keep moving in our direction.
As you say, everything is only a matter of time.  Time, however, is
important.  Your guess of how long it will take and my guess might not
be the same.  And by the time our environment has been duplicated on
other systems, we'll be offering something a whole lot better. 
Meanwhile, we have a product that people can buy, not just promises.

I also think it will be substantially harder to develop advanced
environment software (or advanced software of any kind) on those
systems, due to the lack of firewalling.  This is based on my own years
of experience; obviously I can't prove anything.  But I'd sure hate to
be the one trying to debug serious software on a system without any
checking.