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Up: Lisp's Apparent Failures
This is hard to face up to. For example, most C environments-initially imitative of Lisp environments-are now pretty good. Current best C environments have the following:
And soon they will have incremental compilation and loading. These environments are easily extendible to other languages, with multilingual environments not far behind.
Though still the best, current Lisp environments have several prominent failures. First, they tend to be window-based but not well integrated. That is, related information is not represented so as to convey the relationship. A multitude of windows does not mean integration, and neither does being implemented in the same language and running in the same image. In fact, I believe no currently available Lisp environment has any serious amount of integration.
Second, they are not persistent. They seemed to be defined for a single login session. Files are used to keep persistent data-how 1960's.
Third, they are not multilingual even when foreign interfaces are available.
Fourth, they do not address the software lifecycle in any extensive way. Documentation, specifications, maintenance, testing, validation, modification, and customer support are all ignored.
Fifth, information is not brought to bear at the right times. The compiler is able to provide some information, but the environment should be able to generally know what is fully defined and what is partially defined. Performance monitoring should not be a chore.
Sixth, using the environment is difficult. There are too many things to know. It's just too hard to manage the mechanics.
Seventh, environments are not multi-user when almost all interesting software is now written in groups.
The real problem has been that almost no progress in Lisp environments has been made in the last 10 years.
rpg@lucid.com