Re: Lisp v. Java/Eclipse


Julian Stecklina wrote:
JShrager@xxxxxxxxx writes:

This year I have set out to rewrite that program, and the world is a
different place! First off, Eclipse is great! (If it had macros,
keyboard commands, and was Lisp-programmable it would be The Killer
App!) Eclipse does half the work for you by debugging stupid typos (and
many thinkos!) and looking up arguments and methods really efficiently.

At least on my machine Eclipse felt sluggish with JDK 1.4.1 and
painfully sluggish with 1.5 (both on FreeBSD). Even most basic commands
take seconds, e.g. creating a new file which you do fairly often with
Eclipse.

I have 2.0 GHz 512MB machine and I run eclipse just fine. May be the
problem is with your machine, regarding the performance. Eclipse only
start to slow down for me when I have large and lots of source code
opened at the same time.


Of course, Eclipse eases writing Java considerably, but I am
far from calling it "Killer App".


In the area of IDE it is Killer App.
It is best tool for doing refactoring in Java.
- How do you rename a class/method/variable and have every references
to it also renamed?
think this:
(let ((foo 'foo))
(format t "~A~%" foo)
(let ((foo 'bar))
(format t "foo ~A~%" foo)))
and rename only the inner variable foo to bar without effecting the
string, symbol or outer foo in Emacs with only a few key strokes.
- How do you move method of a class up to its super class in emacs?
- Keep history of your source code every time you save a buffer.
- Error is highlighted as you type, no need to wait for separate
compilation phase to see warning or compile error.

Compare to Eclipse, SLIME is way inferior. symbol completion is basic
in any IDE.

Having avoided Java for ... well, since its birth, I have to say that
I'm having fun making rather complex things happen on the screen in
pretty much no time at all! (And, BTW, my friends and family can
download my code using WebStart and It Just Works!)

Deploying Java applications sucks, if you are not on Windows or some
well-known Linux distribution. If Java was so great for "making complex
things happen" on every system a JDK runs on, why are there so few
projects using it? The number of Java projects in the FreeBSD ports tree
seems not to be orders of magnitude larger than the number of Lisp-based
ports despite the hype.


Checking from my Debian, both Lisp and Java packages available are
mostly development tool. Java seems to have twice more packages than
lisp.

Instead of showing the number of development library, I will instead
show applications that end-users uses -- as it is actually what counts
for how many project people use it.

Go to see SwingSighting, just issue 22 and 21 is enough, If you have
JRE installed, you can even click webstart button to run an application
in a sandbox:

http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/sightings/S22.html

Graphic/Sound Editor, 3D Game, MindMap, DB Frontend, PIM, Report
Generator, Spread***, CVS Client, XML Editor, Data Visualization, Web
site builder, Blog tool, Desktop Publishing, .

And be honest, have you seen all that applications in Common Lisp? Does
it fills 22 pages?


P.S.
It's not that I hate Lisp, I just don't like to bend reality.


Regards,
--
Julian Stecklina

Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using rocks to
sharpen sticks. - Thant Tessman

.