[Openmcl-devel] M1 port: Call for funding

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 1 Jan 2024, at 02:03, R. Matthew Emerson <rme at acm.org> wrote:
> 
> My impression is that many CL users and developers are generally happy to use Emacs and Slime, and are not very interested in a Macintosh IDE. (At least that’s my impression of the open source CL users.). Maybe that’s because such people have become very skilled with Emacs and Slime. I think also that there are some people who don’t care for the Macintosh. That’s OK: it’s a big world.

I think that's the case.  However it doesn't address the question of whether Emacs & Slime is filtering out a lot of people who might otherwise become CL (or Lisp more generally) people.  There is apocryphal evidence that it does, in the form of people complaining about Emacs, and perhaps of people developing other IDEs for CL using fashionable-editing-framework-of-the-month, which I think may have happened more than once (I don't follow whatever the right fora are, but I know someone who sometimes does and she has mentioned this to me sometimes).

> I do believe that it would be good to expose more people to CL, and asking people to learn Emacs and Slime along with CL is a very big request, in my opinion. If a user can easily download and install a double-clickable Mac app and start hacking Lisp, that really reduces the effort required to explore Lisp, and that can only be good.

I absolutely agree with this.  I've used Emacs for a very long time and still use it a great deal.  But I write almost all my Lisp using the LispWorks environment because it's exactly the kind of 'you are now talking to Lisp directly, not down a wire' thing you talked about, which also allows me to do the kind of 'create a little gadget that lets you browse around this data structure' thing that I want.  I forget how close the CCL IDE was/is to that: I have long history with LW which is why I use it.

--tim