Hey Folks, Hi folks. I've programmed a lot and I recently got interested in functional programming hence LISP.
The "LISP In a Box" solution seems of primary importance for getting people using LISP. I tried Peter's LIaB but ended up using XEmacs, SLIME and CLISP installed in their native forms. In hindsight I would like to make the following suggestions for a LISP in a Box 2.0. 1) Full power and free tools I think it is important to feel like you are not installing a "learning" environment but rather something that will have room to grow and produce real projects. There were some things about LIaB that made it feel incomplete. Sorry I can't remember any specifics. I seem to remember the Allegro trial having a 30 day timer and limited stack. I don't want to feel like I'm going to get into things and then have to either switch tools or pony up $600. 2) Most people run Microsoft Windows The collection of tools should all work well on Windows instead of feeling like the only real way to use LISP is to set up and manage a *nix box. I came across several HOWTO's that with said as much. It seems that CLISP is the only free Win32 getting recommendations. Is it the only viable option? What about GCL? What are the limitations of CLISP? 3) Packages make programming fun The non-existent asdf-install/win32 problem is especially bad. After finding a lexer package I wanted to use it took me hours to figure out how packages are managed by LISPers and that it isn't supported on my platform. Then after making routines to manually load the package (CLAWK-REGEX-LEXER) it still didn't work right (some problem with the %0 substitutions). My first LISP project: Write a lexer. Thankfully CLISP has regex built in. 4) Learning a new and totally unfamiliar editor sucks I was excited to learn EMACS because I've always known it is the one true way. I was more excited about learning LISP so learning EMACS turned into an annoying drag getting in my way of coding joy. This frustration actually made it take 3 or 4 tries for me to get anywhere with learning LISP. I now know that EMACS is God but many people are not going to be willing to find this out. What about Jabberwocky? I have glanced at Jabberwocky and it seems that it could be a good option for newbies. I already had CLISP installed and from there installation of Jabberwocky was trivial. The environment has its own eccentricities and suffers from typical Java app annoyances but is pretty straight forward to use. I installed the dev branch and it has many small bugs. I wonder how fast development is going on and/or what the stable release is like. With very little use I found the editor lacking in many ways but the environment is much easier to start working with than EMACS/SLIME. David Aue _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
