Someone explain (Mc)Clim to me as if I were 5 years old

I've managed to get McClim installed and running on debian with cmucl
and slime, been playing with the examples, but I can't seem to wrap my
head around it. It might be b/c I haven't found a good tutorial, but I
think it has more to do with the preconceptions about what a GUI
toolkit is and how GUI programs are structured (I've been developing
GUI's with wxWindows, GTK, and Tk). So here are my preconceptions:

To me, a GUI toolkit at the least:
a. Handles all the low-level interaction with underlying graphics
engine (xlib, etc).
b. Has a collection of 'widgets', preferably arranged in an OO fashion
so you can make your own widgets from existing ones.
c. Has some sort of event system.

And to me, a GUI program is structured as follows:
a. You create instances of different widget with various options,
b. you lay them out in a geometry manager,
c. you bind events to your widgets, and
d. you start your event loop.

Can someone compare and contrast McClim to the more "traditional" gui
toolkits, both in terms of its scope/purpose/goals and how McClim
applications are to be structured?

thanks,
Thetza

.

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