Re: Planned presentation at The Bazaar

[Sam Steingold <sds@goems.com>]

>>>> In message <199810211621.MAA14248@huis-clos.mit.edu>
>>>> On the subject of "Planned presentation at The Bazaar"
>>>> Sent on Wed, 21 Oct 1998 12:21:18 EDT
>>>> Honorable Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu> writes:
 >> 
 >> Many applications provide at least a configuration language - a way
 >> of setting certain options. An extension langauge is the logical
 >> next step. It lets the user actually program aspects of an
 >> application's functionality in a very high level language and extend
 >> aspects of its behavior. In fact, for a very large application, it
 >> may be useful to write only the very basic primitves in a low-level
 >> language like C and write much of the actual functionality in the
 >> extension language. Emacs has used this strategy with great success.

... to its logical end. (http://www.goems.com/~sds/tool.html)

When a "killer app" (like Emacs) has a reasonably good extension
language (like ELisp), people start writing everything in this extension
language, like newsreaders (gnus), web browsers (w3), spreadsheets
(dismal) and computer algebra systems (calc).

It is time to make the next step: from using an "extension" language
(like quile) to extend applications to full-fledged powerful
general-purpose language with a good library (I hint in the direction of
ANSI Common Lisp here, but I would settle for any similarly powerful
language).  With shared libraries, it doesn't matter whether your
applications are extended with a 1MB libguile or 2MB libclisp, but it
will matter for the users whether they will have to reinvent hash
tables, structures and arrays.

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://www.goems.com/~sds) running RedHat5.1 GNU/Linux
Micros**t is not the answer.  Micros**t is a question, and the answer is Linux,
(http://www.linux.org) the choice of the GNU (http://www.gnu.org) generation.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?