[Openmcl-devel] Using Cocoa with MCL

[openmcl-devel-bounces at clozure.com]

Hi everybody,

I am playing around with OpenMCL under OSX, haven't done any serious 
programming for years, so at this stage this is more educational then 
anything else. However, educational or not, I am spoiled by such things 
as the travel advisor example in "Learning Cocoa" or the Watson example 
application that comes with AppleScript Studio. If I have to confine 
myself to the comparatively "more pitiful" examples in Lisp 
tutorials/books, I know already that I will get bored and lose interest 
prematurely.

What I would like is an ability to play with the GUI. So, I checked out 
the Coca examples that come with OpenMCL and played with the rudimentary 
IDE. I realise that this falls short of what bread-and-butter 
programmers will need to do actual work, but to me this is a nice 
starting point and I probably won't even fight with Emacs any further.

Looking at the sources, it seems to me that this stuff is actually 
written in Objective-C with a bit of Lisp wrapped around it. This 
probably means that one has to know/learn both Objective-C and Lisp to 
do anything with it. My skills are not good enough in either language, 
but I would nevertheless like to explore possibilities to play with it. 
Are there any folks out there who are working on either the Cocoa 
interfaces or the IDE or both ?

If so, I would like to know what you are doing. I see in the archives 
that TFB asked about documentation on the Cocoa interfaces. It seems to 
me that if this was better documented, there would probably be more 
folks using and improving it. I am sitting in that boat. I can't really 
figure out how to use this by looking at the sources because my skills 
are limited, yet I cannot read any documentation to learn how to use it. 
Catch 22 ;-)

I would love to add things to that rudimentary IDE, ie. a context 
sensitive HyperSpec lookup, drag and drop support, syntax coloring etc 
etc. However, I don't have the skills to do it. What I am good at is 
writing and explaining in layman's terms how things work, provided I 
understand how they work. Therefore, I was wondering, if there are any 
folks working (or interested to work) on those Cocoa interfaces and/or 
that IDE who are willing to put up with stupid questions from my side in 
return for my contributing some documentation.

rgds
bk


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