[mcclim-devel] Why is CLIM dead

[Christophe Rhodes]

Mariano Montone <marianomontone at gmail.com> writes:

> So I was wondering why CLIM is dead. It looks like it doesn't have any
> activity at all. And I think it is a pity, because when I first looked at
> Listener/Climacs/Debugger/Inspector stuff, I thought it would be a very
> nice replacement for SLIME, for instance. I'm SLIME user, but I think
> there's lot of room for improvements in the Lisp tools area, and the CLIM
> tools + usability improvements + possibilities to extend the tools very
> easily sounds very good to me.

Well, one argument is that things don't start out equal.  Yes, the
Listener, Climacs, Debugger and Inspector are pretty good, but they have
to compete with other tools out there, not only for functionality but
also for maintenance time.  Put bluntly, CLIM is sleeping (maybe not
dead, because interesting ideas never die :) because there was a lack of
person power to keep it awake.  I agree that there's a lot of potential
in the tools, but there's a lot of potential in all sorts of things and
only a limited amount of time to spend developing that potential.

> Does anyone know why CLIM is not used anymore? Does it have any very bad
> design decisions? I'm not really sure about output recording/redisplay, etc
> (I haven't seen theme elsewhere, as if that could be automatically handled
> in general). Don't know about composability and layout yet (I'm still
> struggling a bit with that now). And I also see some bugs, like some
> refreshing problems when scrolling, but bugs should be fixable.

It's not got terrible design decisions: there are a couple of problems
in some layers of the stack, but nothing that couldn't be worked
around.  Output recording and incremental redisplay are brave ideas,
output recording somewhat more salvageable than incremental redisplay,
but they don't cost too much if you don't use them.  I don't think
there's anything fundamentally wrong with CLIM, or fundamentally better
in other toolkits: it's just that the pool of talent and energy to
perform the pretty thankless task of making it all work to the extent of
its potential seems currently unavailable.

What would it take?  Money, or graduate students, I think.

Cheers,

Christophe