Comment by narag
18 years ago
>It's SBCL. And we have really excellent models for tools. If someone would extract SLIME from emacs and into an editor with less history behind it and more popular appeal, you'd have most of the tools you need.
SBCL port to Windows is a work in progress. And what you're saying about tools is more or less that they doesn't exist... yet. And comparing what you need to know and set up to start working with open source Lisp and other environments is... not fair.
> SBCL port to Windows is a work in progress.
So what? Lots of software gets written without ever touching Windows. I've based my entire career on it. An environment can certainly be mature and commercial quality without being multi-platform.
> And comparing what you need to know and set up to start working with open source Lisp and other environments is... not fair.
I do wish that SBCL had a "everything you need to know in 10 minutes or less", but it comes with ASDF and ASDF-INSTALL pre-configured. I mean, the amount of stuff you need to know to start working with Java is pretty darn daunting as well, given that you need massive assistance frameworks, and there is no good central package repo. The reason more people go into Java is that they have colleges introducing them to it.
Yes, more could be done. But I think commercial, professional work is possible right now given the state of SBCL.
>So what? Lots of software gets written without ever touching Windows.
Except most people doesn't want to write "lots of software", but software that fills certain requirements, often customers' requirements: run on Windows, do threads, have a rich GUI, minimize to tray, detect screensaver, interface to word processor, customer's database, customer's crappy ERP, etc.
>the amount of stuff you need to know to start working with Java is pretty darn daunting as well,
I've done both starts (Java and Lisp) and I can't disagree more.
>But I think commercial, professional work is possible right now given the state of SBCL.
It depends on your requirements. For some environments that's not true at all.
> It depends on your requirements. For some environments that's not true at all.
Which is true of nearly every commerical software environment out there. Why does Lisp get such a brutal grading compared to something like MS's CLR or Cocoa? Those are definitely commercially viable platforms that also don't meet these requirements.
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ITA Software is proof of that possibility. Dan Weinreb has written about that often, on comp.lang.lisp and his own blog.