hello all, i have also put this one on http://wiki.alu.org/Gardeners_Projects under discussion list but i am putting it here for comments:
=============================== well, i agree with the the following words written somewhere on this page by someone else: " IMO, what matters here is "simplicity" from a usability standpoint, not a functional one. The answer isn't necessarily to deliver a crippled IDE to the user, but to make the things a beginner needs to do as easy to do as possible. If that can be done in such a way that the delivered tool is still as powerful as SLIME without causing undue confusion, then all the better. " *exactly* this problem led PLT (1) to develop "DrScheme programming environment" which then later made compatible with book "HtDP" (2) (like we have LispBox for PCL). PLT team is doing great with DrScheme , although i do not like their books but i like this DrScheme. we must learn from the way they solved the problem. DrScheme is very popular, cross-plateform, newbie-friendly SCHEME programming environment written in SCHEME (of course it is an IDE, have a look @ www.drscheme.org). we can create an IDE for Lisp, call it *LispIsh* for now, written in Lisp. this idea is same as LINUX is a copy of UNIX. so LispIsh will be a copy of DrScheme Programming Environment. i love "Emacs + M-run-lisp" (M is meta/alt key) and that is not for a newbie. when i tried LIGNUX (well, this name is my invention, as a remedy for the ambiguity of whether LINUX or GNU/Linux ;-) for the first time then i just hated Emacs & kept on using VIM instead, but after 2 months i fell in love with Emacs. you can check for yourself what exactly is DrScheme & why i like it, more imporatntly why newbies like it. we can use CLISP for *LispIsh* because of 2 reasons: 1.) CLISP runs everwhere. 2.) its error-reporting system is very newbie-friendly, it reports only single sentence of what went wrong, rather than printing lots of horrible-looking expressions e.g. like "error in Kernel" in CMUCL . also it does not land into debugger by itself. tell me whether you liked the idea or not? BUT make sure you 1st check www.DrScheme.org. -------------------------------------- (1) PLT: "Programming Languages Team" from RICE University, check http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/. (3) www.htdp.org Categories Unchampioned Project ============================== -- "the great intellectuals" _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
