[Openmcl-devel] The Objective-C Bridge and Clozure CL IDE with Linux and GNUstep

[David McClain]

In  some ways my own situation mirrors that of Terry… So i have an interest in this thread. My own background is very heavy hitting in Lisp, mostly for machine control, signal & image processing, and language development. I am not an expert in GUI design, but I have done my fair share of them. I do find it exasperating that after more than 30 years there is still no decent, easy to use, GUI “system”.

Many years ago I did a bunch of work in Stk, from France. It was a decent system using Tk as its GUI renderer. Just the other day I found some possibly interesting things on Racket (formerly DrScheme). (Sorry for the heresies!)

Currently I use Lipspworks, and have been a devoted user of this system since the early 1990’s. But I too am sliding into retirement, and it is a pricey product. So I’m looking for alternatives.

The mention the other day of using a Web Browser as the GUI was initially interesting. But deeper research into that domain seems a bit discouraging and comes up short for many of my own needs. I do not do “typical” data base browsing and queries. Rather, most of my stuff is ad hoc math modeling and graphing of results. Sometimes I need GUI’s that allow me to enter machine control parameters. I run my Ham rigs with Lisp. I also do a lot of precision RF frequency measurements (microHz level precision, Rb clocks, etc.) And I’m hoping to get back to the sky with some telescopes. Years ago, many many moons ago, I cut my deep programming teeth on Forth and writing the control systems for the world’s largest telescopes. Lisp as become seen by me as what Forth always wanted to become when it grows up…

Anyway, keep the thread going with ideas. I’m interested. Still digging deeper into Racket, since it is very widely cross-platform, and also a kind of Lisp, which makes it really much nicer for me than some Web scripting DSL.

- DM


> On Jun 18, 2015, at 1:48 PM, Terry Lassiter <lassiter at christianfellowships.info> wrote:
> 
> Thank you. I will check out gtk-server.
> 
> Best,
> 
> - TL -
> On 15-06-18 03:08 AM, Tomas Hlavaty wrote:
>> Hi Terry,
>> 
>>> As for hating C++
>> there is also gtk-server which doesn't need ffi at all and might be
>> enough for your needs.  It's quite nice to keep the GUI toolkit part in
>> a separate process and communicate via normal streams; you can even run
>> an app on a headless server with the non-web gui part on your laptop.
>> You get network transparent GUI for free.
>> 
>>> decided that I simply cannot give up either CL or non-web gui,
>> For some things html based GUI can be easy to program if you don't buy
>> into "cool frameworks".  And you could even use w3m or lynx to stay on
>> tty.
>> 
>>> I was repelled by the language then, and still think it is just an
>>> unholy mess. When I give myself a break from qt and C++ to do some
>>> lisp, it feels marvellous.
>> For this reason it can be also much simpler to write a HTML based GUI
>> because you don't need to deal with X Windows, MS Windows, GTK, QT,
>> Motif etc.  but simply read and write portable and pure Lisp and
>> derialize/deserialize to HTML and SVG.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Tomas
> 
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