[mcclim-devel] Why is CLIM dead

[Mariano Montone]

Thanks Christophe

That CLIM needs some human power and is not deeply flawed is good news to
me. I can work on it and use it knowing that my work is not completely
meaningless from the start.

Cheers,

Mariano

On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 5:53 PM, Christophe Rhodes <csr21 at cantab.net> wrote:

> 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
>
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