[Openmcl-devel] upcoming 1.6 release

[Alexander Repenning]

I am excited about the 1.6 CCL release. CCL has come a long way. The plan for the future (and we are supporting this through some funding) includes to work more on IDE aspects. We have some collaboration with Google and in this context we are working increasingly with JavaScript. I suggest to Clozure as well as the CCL community to have a good look at the recent developments of JavaScript. Particularly:

- Debugging environment: Even Safari has a fine REPL, inspector, break points, watchers, profilers, completion, syntax highlighting... that make the current CCL IDE look pretty pale in comparison. And frankly, and I know I will get some heat for this, it makes SLIME look like a museum pice. Go ahead, enable that "Develop" menu in Safari and play around with some JavaScript code

- Performance: By now you may say, OK, that is nice but JavaScript does not have a good object model, a MOP, or macros and MOST IMPORTANTLY is it slow as hell. Speed: Not true, I tell you. Even when you use the JavaScript eval to define function definition on the fly and then run that function JavaScript is now essentially as fast as compiled Lisp!! I am happy to supply some benchmarks if anybody is interested.

Concretely: I think everybody should have a peek at these new browser based IDEs. They are pretty impressive. Why not get inspired in terms of user interface ideas and build some of them into the next version of the Cocoa-based CCL IDE?


Alex 




Prof. Alexander Repenning

University of Colorado
Computer Science Department
Boulder, CO 80309-430

vCard: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf


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