[caplisp-devel] Additional motivations and project issues

[David M. <ra...@gm...>]

Hi all, of course right after dashing off the last missive I of course
remembered several more things I'd meant to mention.

First, why this project, and not just help Kevin with E-on-CL?  We'll
almost certainly be sharing quite a bit of lower level infrastructure
code in places, such as httpsy and other things that in E-on-java rely
on the underlying java and aren't written in E itself, which we'll
have to do for caplisp too.  So why not just pitch in there?

Well because, no offense to anyone, LEAST not the Mar[ck]s, I quite
frankly prefer lisp!  I've always been somewhat heavy into
meta-programming, and growing the language to fit the problem.  The
lisp and forth language families are where I tend to get that kind of
syntax-less goodness.  My personal preference is to use forth for
really small things, and Common Lisp for really big things.  And I'm
talking about building a really big thing with the tools built in this
project, so that kicked me in the CL direction rather than a more
scheme-ish or forth based effort.

I think that the name "caplisp" pretty much writes itself, and has
zero hits in the USPTO database of trademarks, and one totally
un-related hit in google.  So I think that that was pretty much a
no-brainer.

I picked sourceforge for hosting as it's free, permanent (you can't
delete releases, only add new ones, and they won't remove stuff except
for legal takedown orders for patent violation or suchnot in most
cases), not tied down to myself or a specific corporation, university
or other institution, even to sourceforge itself, as there are so many
other mirrors of it that would never dream of deleting open source
code from their archive.  And a sourceforge project comes with ALL the
trimmings!
Hey, maybe you E guys could look into getting one, it's quick, it's
easy! (and I own no stock in ANY company save my dead dotcom, so it's
purely a user endorsement).

I'm intending to use darcs as the version control/patch management
tool for the project.  It is very convenient to use, both via the web
or email (or any other media, for that matter) for distributed
development, and is much simpler to use than cvs, subversion, arch,
etc. IMNSHO.  I've setup the list caplisp-patches (on the project
Lists webpage) for distribution of darcs patches between developers in
realtime for anyone who commits code.  darcs is setup to handle
auto-patching in some very sophisticated ways, but with a very simple
interface. Of course one would only want to auto-apply patches that
are signed by known developers!

There, those 2 emails should give everyone plenty to harangue or argue
with me about!

Cheers,

David Mercer
Tucson, AZ