I'd like to purchase a commercially supported Lisp development
environment. I'd like it to compare favorably to Symbolics
Genera. Would any former Symbolics' user enlighten me regarding
the merits of Franz Allegro, Harlequin LipsWorks, Harlequin
LucidLisp development environments?
thanks,
jpl
From: Dave Dyer
Subject: Re: Seeking Symbolics Genera alternative
Date:
Message-ID: <ddyerDCyvzt.G3I@netcom.com>
Jeff P. Lankford (···@nrtc.northrop.com) wrote:
: I'd like to purchase a commercially supported Lisp development
: environment. I'd like it to compare favorably to Symbolics
: Genera. Would any former Symbolics' user enlighten me regarding
: the merits of Franz Allegro, Harlequin LipsWorks, Harlequin
: LucidLisp development environments?
: thanks,
: jpl
Harlequin is by far the most Symbolics-like development environment.
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In article <··········@gremlin.nrtc.northrop.com>, ···@nrtc.northrop.com
(Jeff P. Lankford) wrote:
> I'd like to purchase a commercially supported Lisp development
> environment. I'd like it to compare favorably to Symbolics
> Genera. Would any former Symbolics' user enlighten me regarding
> the merits of Franz Allegro, Harlequin LipsWorks, Harlequin
> LucidLisp development environments?
> thanks,
> jpl
There are actually *current* Symbolics users around as well, you know, our
group being among them. [And we're looking for more Lisp developers as
well, plug, plug, plug]. I should state that I've never really *liked*
Genera from a user's perspective, finding the applications developed for
it ugly and unwieldy, but I've certainly appreciated the power that Genera
gave me as a developer.
In general, if you're looking for a real Genera-like environment you're
unlikely to be completely satisfied with any of the current products
around. Allegro CL and LispWorks both have more-or-less equivalent
CLX-based windowing interfaces, with lots of windows to display processes,
debug code, inspect objects, edit code, and the like (My experience with
Lucid probably dates back before they had any kind of development
environment other than a pure TTY-based interface; I suspect they probably
have something similar to the other two). Harlequin has their own
integrated Emacs/Zmacs-like editor, Franz uses GNU Emacs as the base
editor with lots of hooks to link source definitions, arglists, form
evaluation and compilation, etc. On a feature-by-feature basis this is
reasonable enough, but they both seem to lack the seamlessness that Genera
provided -- switching between tasks (editing, compiling, running code,
debugging, ...) always seems to involve far too much overhead: "Ok,
where's my debugging frame? [several seconds of random raising and burying
of frames ensues]. Hmm, guess I don't have one. Maybe a listener
[ditto]. Don't have one of those either. Or do I and I just can't find
it? Better find a window browser -- or maybe a process browser. Ah,
here's a window browser -- there's a listener. Now how do I activate it.
Can I click on it. No. Maybe double click? No. Hmm. Select. Find
menubar item (hunt, hunt, hunt). Try 'Activate'. Ah, finally. Now, what
was I supposed to be doing with this?".
Well, maybe things aren't always that intrusive, but I definitely find the
"task transition boundaries" to be much more obvious in the non-Genera
environments than I ever did in Genera. To be fair, this may be due as
much to the differences in base windowing environments as anything
intrinisic to the Lisp products, Genera's windowing system being somewhat
more monolithic than the more chaotic multi-frame style that X
applications generally follow. Nevertheless, there seem to be a lot of
links in Genera that just aren't there in these other environments,
probably due to the lack of a presentation-based semantic framework to
glue stuff together in a consistent and broad-based fashion. CLIM would
give them that ability, but I'm pretty certain they have too much invested
in non-CLIM code to bother :-(
Both Lispworks and Allegro are also sorely lacking in good software
configuration management tools. They have the usual primitive "defsystem"
variants, with modules and systems and dependencies and stuff, but don't
expect to be able to support multiple versions of the same system,
coordinate and distribute formal patches to these systems, or perform any
of a number of important things that you could do in SCT to manage large
software projects. You're likely need to resort to a piecemeal
half-solution using directory naming conventions and underlying Unix
utilities; yuck.
Other random comparisons:
- LispWork's documentation is all online, but the contents aren't nearly
as good as Allegro's.
- Compilers are about even; when I head-to-head tested them, I found one
gave slightly fatter code, the other gave slightly faster code (can't
remember which).
- Reasonable technical support from both, although I've dealt a lot more
with Harlequin recently.
Anyway, I'd say Allegro and LispWorks will probably both give you about
the same experience, for better or worse (again, can't speak for Lucid);
pretty good relative to development systems for other languages (although
nobody seems to have particularly good source-level debugging yet), but
still quite a ways from Genera. Also keep in mind that Symbolics is
still around, under its new owners, and one of their main business goals
is to really push the development of Open Genera. If you have a DEC
Alpha, you might want to keep them in mind as well.
pch