Re: Bundling of layered software

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Thu, 22 Mar 90 09:50 CST
    From: dmitchell@backus.trc.amoco.com (Donald H. Mitchell)

      Date: Thu, 22 Mar 90 09:05 CST
      From: Richard Billington <buff%pravda@gatech.edu>
	    [...]
      Symbolics has been a leader in "bundling" tools and extensions to lisp (tools: windows,
      zmacs, debugger, examiners - extensions: loop, flavors, clim) to the point where every
      major addition to what is becoming a part of the accepted "minimum production lisp
      environment" is something that has become a standard part of Genera for at least a
      couple of years already.

    I've changed my mind.  Now I agree!  The full richness of the development
    environment is THE selling point for Symbolics's products.  

I fail to see how Statice can be considered part of the "development"
environment.  The development environment is something that is used
during program development, but which doesn't need to be around during
production runs.  Zmacs is part of the development environment because
it is used to write code, not to run it.  If you're talking about a
Statice-based source code management system I guess it could be
considered for the development environment, but I've been assuming that
people are talking about bundling it so they can develop Statice-based
applications of their own without requiring their customers or
management to purchase Statice separately.

As far as my company is concerned, runtime features that aren't
standardized (or de facto standardized) and don't have portable
implementations are almost worthless.  Our products hardly use the
window system, presentation types, and flavors.  It wouldn't matter to
us if they bundled Concordia (we use Interleaf) or Statice; CLIM would
be nice since it may soon become a de facto, and perhaps eventually an
official, standard (on the other hand, we might go with CLM, the
recently-announced interface between CLX and Motif).

                                                barmar