ChapterZero

All day, I’ve been downloading Common LISP and Scheme implementations, looking for the right combination of power and documentation to assure me that when I invest my time in that system, I’ll be able to consider it a good investment: ideally, the system should make simple things easy to do, and complicated things possible (to borrow from the Perl lore). I have yet to find a system with a well-documented and stable interface to GTK. I might have to settle for a more generic X toolkit interface, but I would rather stick with GTK, both for familiarity with the API, and the relatively superb look and feel. I’m trying to avoid anything as trashy looking as a Tk toolkit, though. It seems that everything I could want is out there, but none of the major parts work together: there’s a GTK binding for Guile, but no binding for CLISP; there’s an IDE for Bigloo, but none for any other CLISP system; there’s a Scheme implementation which allows access to shared libraries without any glue code, but no equivalent CLISP systems. In fact, my head is being turned around by all the options. A big part of the problem is that there is very little documentation, and what is available is generally poor, for any of these systems. So it’s not as though I could narrow down to choices by choosing whatever systems/environments have the best documentation. Nope, whatever I choose is entirely up to me, and I have no idea what criteria to use, not having used CLISP or Scheme before. And whatever I do choose, I have to learn through experimentation. The utter sparcity of documentation on CLISP and Scheme is annoying! I thought I had it hard with other languages…