Re: LispWorks IDE history & precursors (semi-off-topic)

Tim Bradshaw <tfb@cley.com> writes:

> Is there any recorded history of the LW IDE, and influences on it?  I can remember seeing a Harlequin Lisp environment in (I think) 1989, but I don't remember if that was anything like the current environment and in fact I don't know if it was a direct ancestor of LW.
>
> Slightly related: I once thought that the editor had common heritage with Hemlock (whose heritage I don't actually know other than that it came with CMUCL, so perhaps from Spice Lisp): is that actually true or is it a completely independent thing.
>
> This is just personal curiosity.

As long as where walking down memory lane: what became of the MLWorks
environment Harlequin once distributed in beta test? It was a remarkably
nice way to work with a *ML type language.

RE: LispWorks IDE history & precursors (semi-off-topic)

Re: LispWorks IDE history & precursors (semi-off-topic)

Christopher Melen <relativeflux@hotmail.co.uk> writes:

> Hi Tim,
>
> I know that Rainer Joswig had some great information on historical Lisp IDEs (as well as stuff on Lisp machines) at his old site, which unfortunately now seems to
> be permanently down. I think there were one or two screenshots of a much older version of the LW IDE on the site.
>
> I believe LispWorks is indeed descended from Harlequin - in fact the HCL package refers to Harlequin Common Lisp. I've never heard anything about a connection to
> Hemlock, though.
>
> There's also this, which I find intriguing...

I asked Martin Simmons about this once:

>>> PS. Congratulations on the release of LispWorks 6! I am very happy
>>> with the new features (and I have not had the time to look at all of
>>> them. And where is the Harlequin? :-)

> Thanks!  And congratulates on reading the release notes so thoroughly
> :-) 
>
> The Debug toolbar button design (Listener, Process Browser) is a
> Harlequin ladybird.  These are now common in parts of England, and
> apparantly have also reached South Africa:
>
> http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=14&art_id=vn20080422062917399C560531

Re: LispWorks IDE history & precursors (semi-off-topic)

The main thing I recall was in Interlisp - the stack was a first class object (so you could capture the state of your program in a variable for backtracking purposes - like a dynamic closure, but without the limitations - more like a continuation). And using the editor meant you couldn't do conditional compilation - we dropped the D machines for Lisp at U Rochester when we needed to write portable code. (That is, no way to do #+foo since that's outside your parens). Since we had a mixed unix (franz), symbolics, dandylion environment, the d machines were the 'most different' and fell into disuse. (I think there was a group that continued to use Mesa for some years though).


On Feb 18, 2012, at 7:45 AM, Tim Bradshaw wrote:

> 
> On 17 Feb 2012, at 22:42, rudolf mittelmann wrote:
> 
>> Because of your remarks about Interlisp D 
>> (I worked on Dandelion machines with Interlisp D from 1985-90?)
>> I just loaded LispWorks Personal and I can't get it. What is the relation/inheritance/similarity? The Inspector?
> 
> Well, my memory is now fading since, like you, I've not used a D machines for more than 20 years, but I think the way it reminds me of them is that it's a lots-of-little-windows environment (ie listener, editor, inspector, system browser &c &c), together with the ability to make your own tools in an incredibly lightweight way -- I'm still in the process of reviving various things I had from old CVS repositories, but it's terribly easy to create little visualisation tools based on the grapher, and I used to have lots of such things, as well as others I'd make on the fly via CAPI:CONTAIN.
> 
> Obviously it differs in that it look after source as text files with an emacsy editor rather than as structures in memory with a structure editor, and that's a pretty profound difference.
> 
> But compared to the MIT-family environments it's also very different.  I don't know how it compares with other modern non-Lisp IDEs - I have only really used Eclipse and LW just grinds that into dust, for me.
> 
> --tim

Re: LispWorks IDE history & precursors (semi-off-topic)

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