[Openmcl-devel] History

[Steve Núñez]

Gentlemen,I'm a bit courious as to the history openmcl. On the Clozure website it states in the sidebar that 

"Gary Byers forked the code in 1998 ... this fork was called OpenMCL when Digitool open sourced it in 2001. 
Digitool announced in 2007 that MCL will be open sourced. ..."

The first part is clear enough, but what happened to the Digitool MCL? I don't see that anywhere on their website. In fact their website seem to have stopped being updated, with the last "What's New?" dated 2005. A long mailing list thread back in 2007 discussed porting various bits of MCL to OpenMCL. I never used MCL, but much of the discussion revolved around porting things like Fred & CAPI to OpenMCL. I personally like emacs/slime, but for some of the newer programmers in our environment, especially those coming from other, usually Java based IDE's, a good development environment would smooth the transition until they came up to speed. Hemlock just doesn't impress newcomers. 

This post: 

    http://clozure.com/pipermail/info-mcl/2007-October/000109.html 

and Peter Paine's comments: 
Lisp in itself does not win more than a quirky following (and give passing students headaches). Allowing developers to do flashy MacOS-ish things could help get the bandwagon's wheels turning. Wizard Lisp compiler and terminal tools will at best serve the needs of a vanishingly small niche.  But a Lisp environment that helps developers to put together modern applications which serve end user needs, surely this will open doors ... why not flood gates. The API will help bring Lisp out of the lab/ivory tower.

was pretty good, I thought. Personally, I'd lean toward a great Cocoa toolkit and forget about portability, since resources would probably not permit both. 

Anyway, that's old news, but an interesting thread. What's happened since October 2007? We've got quite a few PPC lying about, where can we get MCL to try it out? 

Cheers, 

    - SteveN 



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