[climacs-devel] Re: Lisp Gardeners to help Climacs

[John Q Splittist]

I wonder if we need to give the gardeners a bit of a blurb about what climacs 
is (and isn't), how it fits into the gardener philosophy (such as it is), and 
how to go about getting and using it?

Perhaps something along these lines (I assume it works with CMUCL):

_An Introduction To/For Climacs_

Climacs is a project to develop a Common Lisp based Emacs-like editor in [Mc]
CLIM. (See http://common-lisp.net/project/climacs/ for some not-necessarily-up-
to-date eye candy and a note on what climacs is _not_.)

But climacs is more than this. It is also:

o part of an actually-used-in-the-real-(or, at least, academic)-world 
application with genuine users - a lute tablature editor

o a complex system that raises interesting issues of design, protocol and 
architecture

o a platform for exploring the power of the clim paradigm

o an application that provides a tough challenge for its supporting subsystems 
(compilers and mcclim) ie. it regularly throws up bugs and/or performance 
issues

o part of a suite of co-operating clim-based apps that provide a full Common 
Lisp development environment - or, at least, it will be, one day (see Dwight 
Holman's clim-desktop for a good start to this: http://www.cliki.net/clim-
desktop )

o a way for Common Lisp developers to eat their own dogfood - already a few 
trailblazers are using climacs (and clim-desktop) to develop other CL apps, 
fixing bugs in or extending the functionality of climacs as they go

Climacs is not quite yet at the point where bug-reports unaccompanied by bug-
fixes are useful, but with a bit of TLC and regular tending by a few 
gardeners, there is no reason it shouldn't soon be in a state to be a sensible 
recommendation to programmers who happen to be new to Common Lisp.

We believe helping with/using climacs benefits the Common Lisp Garden more 
generally (but we would, wouldn't we? :-). By making it possible for Common 
Lisp developers to live in a fully CL environment, it encourages and enables 
continuous and incremental improvement of all the elements of that 
environment, from compilers and guis to debuggers and editors to irc clients, 
document viewers and (who knows?) media players and lisp movie makers...

We'll be suggesting a few climacs-related gardeners projects soon, but if you 
have something you want to work on, feel free to suggest it. (Suggesting 
things for others to work on is less welcome, and perhaps better directed to 
the climacs-devel mailing list.)

We also encourage you to have a play with climacs. There are instructions on 
downloading on the project page (see above (use the CVS version); you will 
need McClim http://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/ (use the CVS version) and 
Flexichain (but this is mentioned in the INSTALL file, so you didn't need us 
to tell you that...); it's probably a good idea to do the whole clim-desktop 
thing while you're at it (see above), not least because you will get some 
interesting slime-like functionality with Swine (part of clim-desktop).). 
Climacs works with CMUCL, SBCL and OpenMCL.

JQS