Some recent favorites.
Brian Hayes on an MCL fan's modern existence:
If Franz Kafka were a Lisp programmer, he would be an MCL user -- waiting patiently by the outer gate of the castle, year after year, hoping for some word from on high -- if not an announcement then maybe at least a rumor, a hint, a sign. Now and then Kafka meets another faithful Digitool devotee; they commiserate, and compare notes. Are they fools to stand around waiting all this time? Are the Lords of Lisp up there in the turrets of the castle looking down at them and laughing? Or is the castle actually abandoned, vacant, falling to ruin? They fear the worst, but in the end they decide to wait a while more. After all these months and years, why lose hope now? 5.2 will be great when it gets here.
I gave up hope years ago.
Posted by jjwiseman at March 22, 2007 08:43 AMYep, I worked with MCL throughout my career, and for the life of me I can't understand how such a beautiful implementation ended up in this vampire-like quantum state. You'd think that Apple would be smart enough to notice the current status quo, buy off Digitool, and do a real stunner of a Lisp for the Mac again.
Posted by: Dimitri on March 22, 2007 01:52 PMI gave up on MCL after spending 500 and change on the 5.0 release. I soon regretted having done that. At this point why not open-source it and sell support contracts?
Posted by: iPaul on March 23, 2007 02:50 PMApple already has quite embarrassing riches of APIs and languages and things; I doubt they're overly keen to add more.
There's always OpenMCL (PPC only), of course!
Posted by: Robert Synnott on April 4, 2007 03:52 PMOpenMCL is not just PPC anymore. The 1.1 pre-release support Intel Mac, and 64-bit Linux.
Posted by: Brent on May 5, 2007 11:14 PM