ttf@VAX3.ITI.ORG ("Tihamer T. Toth-Fejel") (07/31/89)
I have experience on explorers, suns running lucid commonlisp & knowledgecraft, xerox 1100's, and suns running xerox (envos). By far, the best development environment is envos, with explorers coming a near second, especially once I fixed it to act more like envos. Lucid commonlisp comes a very distant third, primarily because the editor is not integrated at all. We are getting our third sun 4 running with envos for < than $20K considerably less, in fact, but we have an educational discount. I would agree with Hunter that a sun with lots of memory is a good idea, but I would STRONGLY discourage Lucid Commonlisp as a development environment. Delivery - maybe. I like the way Robert Nobel (Lisp guru from Intellicorp) compared envos (xerox) and the sybolics (which is very similar] to the explorer, I hear). The envos system gives you precise control quickly, like a small whip - flick, flick, flick. The symbolics, he said, is like a battleship main gun - takes a long time to get the gun pointed at your problem, and then KABOOM! My personal experience is that the Interlisp (envos) system is much friendlier WRT to West coast style of sloppy windows, which gives you cognitive access to much more info than the East coast, neat windows. While the explorer disk ascess is considerably faster, there is not much need for it as there is grab and stuff capability that envos has, (and so does suntools, but lucid doesn't use it!!!! idiots). WRT to unix communication, it is true that Lucid does have a relatively good one, but I don't see that necessarily as an advantage. As far as I'm concerned, unix was invented before there was such a thing as mouse, giving rise to the "limited number of keystokes per lifetime" idea, resulting in the rediculous use of abreviations. Unix was writen for machines, not for people. On the other hand, Xerox Parc did a lot of work on human factors when they designed the tools that are included in envos. Ok, I'll get off my soap box now.