Re: Still clinking to Java?



verec wrote: 
On 2005-10-23 06:05:16 +0100, Kenny Tilton <ktilton@xxxxxxxxxx> said:

- their "IDE" is a joke. Period.


Agreed. When you get bored with trolling, try AllegroCL. 


No need to be insulting to suggest AllegroCL.

But that still will not be the match of Java IDEs.


If you say so, it must be true :-)

I happen to have been playing recently with both the latest VC++ IDE (express?) and the NetBeans IDE on win32. This because I happen to have C and Java versions of a rather hairy educational math app. The Java version was meant to be an applet but then I lost interest. This all goes back like ten years. I was toying with saving effort by making the C version a DLL and redoing the GUI in my portable Cello GUI. But there would be new work on the engine, and just trying to get a clean compile of the C version under VC++ I saw enough to remind me I would rather work in Lisp. And a relatively literal translation to Lisp will be straightforward, mostly typing since I am pretty comfortable with both languages. Also, I used the C preprocessor a lot so I just have to port C macros and voila. And I can grind it out for a month.

Anyway, having seen those two IDEs I am both impressed and less interested in living with them.



The big point being, wow, Lisp must be insanely great that huge
IDE investments can simply be skipped.



Nobody else can dictate how *I* am productive. If Emacs fits
your bill, the best to you. It doesn't fit mine.

You are mistaken. I hate the EMACS+SLIME thing. I edit in AllegroCL in emacs mode.


Meditate on that for six months and get back to us. 


Yes, Dad!

Understood though if you want to troll on for a few mor
weeks to deal with your loneliness.



That's pretty lame.

We always know a troll when we see a long list of interesting
requirements stated in the abstract. What is your application? (Ha!)



- I develop on Mac, but the target is Win (and possibly Linux)
 => portable

I plan on distributing on both mac and windows. Linux will be possible since my candidate portable GUIs run on all three. Depends on how much more trouble it is to support.

- My client has 80 cross-words to publish per week. I have to
 provide him with filled grids (he provides the templates
 15x15 to 25x25)  from a 100,000 words dictionary
- Once the product is finished, I expect to only provide a
"do-it" button and just write 80 files to the file system
(format not decided now, but relatively unimportant)
- But before the product is finished, it has to work! Which
 means that until such time *I* am the user. And as the user
 of that product while it is being developped I need:
- a "GUI" to diplay the grids and *see* the successive attempts
 at filling it, so as to develop a "feel" for what sort
 of algorithm works and what doesn't.
- I need threads because I want to be able to run/suspend/resume
 the solver at any time, without cluttering the solver code
 with GUI stuff.
- I've done it in Java this far, precisely because of the above
 problems (thread+GUI)

I've reached 92% completion of the grid in about 7 minutes.
That's my best result so far, and, obviously, I'm not done.
Nothing less than 100% is acceptable of course. And preferably
in an amount of time suitable to produce 80 such filled grids
per weeks, so it can take many minutes, but not many hours.

The combinatorial explosion just rules out any brute force
approach.

Sounds like you have some interesting work ahead. That argues for a language that lets you explore without fussing over the language's limitations. (Hint.)



Obviously, as soon as I get something that I deem acceptable,
I just don't want to switch language _at that point_ and recode
what I will have needed so many experiments to get right. So
the prototyping language must be the deployment langauge.

I do not know about the threads issue. If you can afford AllegroCL I believe you will be good to go, since their stuff runs on all three and I believe with the same API for threading and more. If you have to switch Lisps, you might get by with a relatively small amount of conditional compilation. Then question is where you want to put your effort, on a finite task generating an ad hoc portable threading package, or on a never-ending effort coding in Java.

You have accurately identified some small downsides in using Lisp. Now tell us again how the language is otherwise so great you wish you could use it for your project.

--
Kenny

Why Lisp? http://wiki.alu.org/RtL_Highlight_Film

"I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it."
Elwood P. Dowd, "Harvey", 1950

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