[Openmcl-devel] openmcl future features

[alex crain]

Coincidentally, I just starting looking at this again today, after  
putting everything down for a few months in order to go make some money.

My approach to this problem was to assemble what I felt were the core  
essentials: editor, listener, inspector and enough common glue to create
more interface parts as needed. When I stopped working in May, I had  
those parts plus a few more assembled into a package that could be
developed independently from the CCL core.

Unfortunately, May was when Apple released Tiger which solidly broke  
the world, or at least my part of it, and I've been too distracted to  
fix anything.

Anyway, once the core was more or less working, I asked myself the  
same question that you just posed to the group and decided that what I
wanted was a tool that I could use to create new apps with, like xcode.

That gets a little tricky with COCOA because of the event loop - you  
need to be able to develop an app with the IDE in place and in  
foreground
and then run the app as a standalone application without the IDE (or  
at least make the IDE dormant and invisible).

Anyway, my list would look like this:

Editor
Listener
Debugger (Step, Trace, Stack viewer)
Bundle Manager
Documentation manager - Lisp docs and external class descriptions  
integrated with the editor
ham sandwich, grilled in butter with swiss cheese and dijon mustard.
Inspector for objects, packages, bundles, classes
Thread viewer
class map viewer


> I want to elicit the group's vision of the future of openmcl,  
> particularly requirements for the openmcl IDE.  This is a little  
> bit of a pita since the available medium is email, but I will try  
> to make the most of it and ask the least of you.  Respond as you  
> see fit, but I'd like to have as many participate as possible---and  
> if you think I'm asking questions that I aught to (as a lisp  
> programmer) already know the answers to, you're right, but I  
> thought it might be good if I got a second opinion: Yours!
>