[Openmcl-devel] upcoming 1.6 release

[Robert Goldman]

On 10/25/10 Oct 25 -8:31 AM, Jon Anthony wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-10-24 at 11:55 -0600, Alexander Repenning wrote:
>> I suggest to Clozure as well as the CCL community to have a good look
>> at the recent developments of JavaScript. Particularly:
> 
> Having been using JS for a while now (as part of a couple projects) I
> would agree that as a language it is rather better (and more
> interesting) than a lot of other so called "new languages".  It also has
> an even more remarkable aspect: it is typically fun.  It would  be a
> very nice alternative to Java if it had a more robust industrial base.
> 
> 
>> - Debugging environment: Even Safari has a fine REPL, inspector, break
> 
> I use Firefox with Firebug.  That's pretty nice, but I wouldn't rave
> about it at the level you do here.  The debugger is only usable and as
> an full IDE, it falls down by not having an editor aspect that has much
> going for it.  Maybe Safari is better.

Seconded.  The challenge I've found with this is that if I want to write
a real application, then I often need to do stuff that the sandbox will
not let me do (e.g., interact with the local filesystem).

That means I have to write chrome (in Firefox, and I don't know what in
other browsers).  Debugging the chrome can be very difficult, because
you are messing with the environment in which the debugger itself runs.
 The chromebug tool helps with this on Firefox (and there's mozrepl,
too), but it's not a debugging environment with which I'm really happy.

I haven't used Safari for this, either, but I find also in firebug that
interactive development is poorly supported.  If I replace the
definition of a bit of javascript, the IDE seems to get out of sync
(breakpoints, etc. are lined up with the line numbering in the original
file, not the new definition from the REPL).

So I'm not ready to abandon the lisp debugger and emacs for this yet....

best,
r