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Comment by lokedhs | Hacker News Reader

The McCLIM project implements this user interface and can be used today: https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/

It's still a work in progress, but a lot of progress have been made recently. What is really needed is more applications, and we invite anyone who's interested to play around with it and perhaps build something for it.

I have implemented a user interface for Maxima that uses McCLIM, taking advantage of many of the same features shown in the original post: https://github.com/lokedhs/maxima-client

If you just want to see what it looks like, here's a video: https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/df751bd5-5a26-44...

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I think it’s wonderful to think McCLIM but it’s important to note that so much of the value of the Lisp machine’s interface is derived from (1) the OS level integration of the dynamic language, (2) the single-process aspect (everything lives in the same memory space, all objects can interact without serialization, and (3) the fact that developers thought that documentation and interaction were a true part—a first class citizen—of the development of their software.

I guess this blurs into the user experience. The interface, which McCLIM is based on, gives a lot of the widgets and interaction modes you need for something like a Lisp machine experience, but you really need your entire development and end-user environment to be built up with the above points as well.

The idea is that McCLIM is a base and that there are so many applications (like a listener) that it approaches an actual development environment.

If you run everything in your Lisp image, on top of McCLIM then you have that experience.

I kind of try to illustrate that in the video I linked. Every object is that is displayed is a Lisp object such as the individual parts of Maxima expressions. You can see the underlying Lisp expression after the Lisp listener window is opened.

One major component that is missing is a good editor that takes advantage of all of this. There is Climacs, which is actually quite powerful but it has issues. There is also other efforts, including one by myself but nothing is really ready for production. This is an area where some interested developers could make a huge difference.

I would say you could get it, but loading up a Lisp image doesn’t give you it for free. Folks (like yourself!) need to build actual applications in CLIM, or better yet, an operating system whose UI is driven by something like CLIM.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18p8-ip98iev9LW-Gtf0TMOJbfgY...

Built with reasonably recent McCLIM and SBCL. At one point, had it running under CCL on one of my Raspberry Pi boxes (the 3, I think). Would have made a cool pocket, ersatz LispM.

Source code:

https://bitbucket.org/symbolicsimulation/com.symsim.oss.lisp...

Yeah, I know it's a mess. With the exception of updating the calls to the inspector just now (in case anybody tried to build it), it's just as I last left it a few years ago - with the proverbial hood open, subsystems not really working, and parts lying all over the floor.

Do you happen to know whether there's any McCLIM library that works on Windows with SBCL?

McCLIM's native Windows backend is in a very early stage of development, if not abandoned. You can use McCLIM on Windows with an X server, e.g. VcXsrv or Xming.

A useful step could be for some Windows developers to recommend which low-level graphics API McCLIM should use.

Since none of the McCLIM contributors use Windows, there have been very little work on a Windows backend.

One idea has been to use a common low level interface such as SDL to implement a backend, which would then be very easy to get to work on Windows. Like you said, some Windows developers would have to provide input as to which one would be the most appropriate.

You can pay for LispWorks (inseado of sbcl) and it will run CLIM programs under Windows.

Note that sbcl is just another Common Lisp implementation, you could use others as well.

McCLIM is and has always been a total mess (stability, look and feel, speed, platform support, feeling of robustness) and I would definitely not recommend it, at its current state, to non-hardcore Common Lispers (since it's likely to do more harm than good and turn people off CL entirely).

A big reason for that is its X dependency and focus on X/Linux as the prime development platform rather than a cross-platform base by default. Other projects (Pharo, Squeak, Factor IDE) have done a much better job at tackling similar issues.

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