From: joswig@... (Rainer Joswig) Date: 2003-08-17T06:37:00+09:00 Subject: Re: Refactoring Browsers (was: [ann] AEditor 0.10, folding added) avi@beta4.com (Avi Bryant) wrote in message news:<6e869a6b.0308161015.3827ae54@posting.google.com>... > "Its Me" wrote in message news:... > > > I am not convinced that there is a deep tradeoff of environment Vs. language > > expressiveness and dynamism. The Lisp world back in the 80's had a > > combination of superb environment (easily comparable to Smalltalk) and heavy > > use of arbitrarily sophisticated code generation (Lisp macros). All parts of > > the environment, including the debugger, were amazingly macro aware. > > This is drifing off topic, but I'd like to know more. Was the LispM > environment truly comparable to (modern) Smalltalk? No it was very different. > Current Lisp > environments (I've used Allegro and LispWorks) really don't come > close, especially when it comes to tools like version control - what's > the Lisp equivalent of ENVY or StORE? The Symbolics Lisp Machine had a source construction tool (SCT) with versions and patch support and there was a versioning system for source (VC). > Or, since that's where this > thread started, of the Refactoring Browser? There was some refactoring stuff in Zmacs. But not that much. > I'm not trying to get into a pissing match here - Lisp is wonderful, > and there are lots of things in CL (and in Scheme, and in Ruby for > that matter) that I miss in Smalltalk. But I honestly do think that > Smalltalk hits a sweet spot in terms of tool support, and I have a > hard time imagining how certain tools would work in the Lisp world - > like versioning by semantic chunks instead of raw text/s-exprs. If > those problems were in fact solved back in the 80s, I'd love to hear > about it. Well, in terms of features the Lisp Machines will be good for some surprises. It might be educational to read a bit about InterLisp D from Xerox and/or Genera from Symbolics. Here is a Quicktime movie with some audio comment, demoing some of Genera - actually really only a tiny bit: http://lispm.dyndns.org:8000/mov/lispm-2.mov or http://lispm.dyndns.org:8000/mov/lispm-2a.mov