Displacement, CLIM and Character Sets

Ben Hyde writes about the elegance of CLIM and the difficulty of getting SLIME to work with unicode, in the context of displacement.

Displacement is an economic or cultural process were by a community of practice wakes up one morning to discover that the tide of history has left it high and dry.

(Uh oh.)

In the Common Lisp community a really unbelievably elegant user interface tool kit emerged known as CLIM (or Common Lisp Interface Manager). But this beautiful elegant thing had no concept of “the selection.” As a result it was totally irrelevant to the building of the kinds of user interface that were demanded by those working where the action was. Great ideas displaced by no particular fault of it’s own.

(Oh, phew.)

That Lisp would be left behind in the evolution of character set handling was something I was a little worried about, but most implementations added support for unicode years ago. The big open source Lisps are sometimes a little behind, but as Ben points out, they're working on it.

Posted by jjwiseman at January 16, 2005 03:30 PM