Lemonodor: Info-mcl reborn

June 29, 2007

From: Peter Paine
Subject: Re: info-mcl update
Date: 2007-06-29 07:15:33 GMT

At 1:58 PM -0400 6/28/07, Alice Hartley wrote:
>The info-mcl mailing list is now being hosted by Clozure.

Hurrah! The info-mcl list actually seems to be working again - after 
all those dysfunctional years.

It will be interesting to see who remains a MCL user, what with the 
list being mangled for so long, the brick wall of Intel compatibility 
(i.e. MCL is unusable on any current Apple product), Digitool last 
showing signs of life via it's site in May 2005, and now the 
unilateralist Apple raising it's axe over Carbon's neck.

Of course the big question is how Clozure is talking to Digitool (and 
vici versa).

OpenMCL seems to have it all, Cocoa, 64bits, Open, ... but it doesn't 
have what MCL has had - a development environment in which a lisp 
engineer can work to develop an application.  Starting with Fred, 
graphics, ...

Here's hoping that Lisp on the Mac platform can come back from the 
dead.  After all the work put into Lisp over the years, my hope is 
that we are about to see a renaissance.  But as I'm primarily a GUI 
developer, I live perhaps in a world of self delusion - I call 
optimism.

Without communication there was no chance of community, without 
community MCL's future was dire.  I think just mention of MCL/Clozure 
is a good omen.

PS. I subscribed to http://clozure.com/mailman/listinfo/info-mcl and 
was notified that I was already subscribed.  Interestingly the 
notification says "Note that the list membership is not public", 
though I fear it is forwarded to Gmane and hence Google and the 
world's sewer.  I would much prefer the list to work in itself and 
not to be accessible to Gmane (ie. be private for those interested in 
MCL).