[mcclim-devel] Why is CLIM dead

[Bill Sauer]

Hi,

As a casual user of CLIM I find the most frustrating problem is just downloading all the proper pieces and placing them where they can be used.  If someone would take the time to create a pdf of step by step instructions on where to go, what to download, and the required destinations it would be most helpful.  I know some things like this exist but many seem out of date and don’t really work that well.

I currently use SBCL on a Fedora 12 machine.

Regards
Bill Sauer


From: Mariano Montone 
Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2012 5:57 PM
To: Christophe Rhodes 
Cc: mcclim-devel at common-lisp.net 
Subject: Re: [mcclim-devel] Why is CLIM dead

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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