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These things are just improvements to catch up with rendering and things people require from toolkits currently. Where CLIM really shines is its model of presen

These things are just improvements to catch up with rendering and things people require from toolkits currently. Where CLIM really shines is its model of presenting things (and this is something developed long time ago). UI is not just a rectangular area where you slap things (which may be eventually clicked). It is rather a representation of the application state and possible interactions with it. In McCLIM presented objects have types and inner state. When you activate command you may select arguments (which are typed) on the screen or by doing a particular gesture. Same object may be presented differently based on a view. Relevance is not about sexy new things from the last month. I don't know JS well, but my impression is that rotation of technologies in its ecosystem is pretty big, what may be a clue, that abstractions may be just so-so. CLIM is a specification which covers many concepts required to build efficient and extensible user interfaces.

lf-non 9y ago
The rotation of technologies that depend on (and attempt to simply) the abstractions exposed by the browser's host APIs may be quite frequent, however the underlying DOM model seems very similar to what you are describing here. The web standards have a stellar track record of backward compatibility. > UI is not just a rectangular area where you slap things (which may be eventually clicked) Web developers (or application developers) in present day world don't write routines to draw things on canvas (although you can if you really have a use case [1]). We program against the dynamic DOM tree, which presents our application state. We have sophisticated data binding libraries [2] to bind javascript models with the DOM tree. The emergent web component standard appears very similar to what you describe as "presented objects having types and inner state". > Relevance is not about sexy new things from last month When asking the question my objective was not to deride the effort that has gone behind this project. It is just that the current application homepage does not do a very good job of convincing a present day developer the appeal of developing GUI systems using common lisp. Also an X server is required to run the applications, which, excluding linux users, is not something most people have installed now a days. [1] For example paper.js implements a scene graph model on top of canvas. [2] Mobx is a popular library for transparent functional reactive programming in javascript.
- carry_bit 9y ago
  React gets you close. I've thought about trying to write a library to add a command loop and presentations to React, but haven't gotten around to it.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  I'm probably more familiar with JS than Dan is, so let me address some things: You could, eventually, implement something similar to CLIM presentations with web components. You could also implement something a lot like webcomponents with CLIM presentations. They are quite different though. I have not used MobX, but I just browsed the intro page (yes it's way better at explaining what it is than CLIM is). CLIM doesn't really compare apples-to-apples with React/MobX, since the abstractions used are different, but they are both approaches to providing simple ways of presenting and manipulating domain state with a gui. In particular MobX actions and CLIM commands have some similarities, but also significant differences. Also, (assuming MobX doesn't change this) React is typically used to provide declarative rendering of the full application state. CLIM allows you to do this, but it is more common to have each bit of state declaratively rendered, while treating the UI state imperatively. This was absolutely necessary 20 years ago, and is still often a good idea today (look at some of the gymnastics Netflix has had to do to make long-lists render efficiently in React; with imperative state you can just keep appending and CLIM doesn't care because non-visible state won't get re-rendered until it is needed; granted some of that is also because the DOM is a different level of abstraction than a local GUI window...). On the other hand, after doing some javascript GUIs, I think I'll be more intentional about when I make this divide in CLIM applications; declarative GUIs are almost always easier to reason about.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
lf-non 9y ago
I just found your demo video about McCLIM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfBmRsPRdGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfBmRsPRdGg) and found it to very helpful to put things you outlined into perspective. I have linked to it in a top level comment.

lf-non 9y ago

The rotation of technologies that depend on (and attempt to simply) the abstractions exposed by the browser's host APIs may be quite frequent, however the underlying DOM model seems very similar to what you are describing here. The web standards have a stellar track record of backward compatibility. > UI is not just a rectangular area where you slap things (which may be eventually clicked) Web developers (or application developers) in present day world don't write routines to draw things on canvas (although you can if you really have a use case [1]). We program against the dynamic DOM tree, which presents our application state. We have sophisticated data binding libraries [2] to bind javascript models with the DOM tree. The emergent web component standard appears very similar to what you describe as "presented objects having types and inner state". > Relevance is not about sexy new things from last month When asking the question my objective was not to deride the effort that has gone behind this project. It is just that the current application homepage does not do a very good job of convincing a present day developer the appeal of developing GUI systems using common lisp. Also an X server is required to run the applications, which, excluding linux users, is not something most people have installed now a days. [1] For example paper.js implements a scene graph model on top of canvas. [2] Mobx is a popular library for transparent functional reactive programming in javascript.

carry_bit 9y ago
React gets you close. I've thought about trying to write a library to add a command loop and presentations to React, but haven't gotten around to it.
aidenn0 9y ago
I'm probably more familiar with JS than Dan is, so let me address some things: You could, eventually, implement something similar to CLIM presentations with web components. You could also implement something a lot like webcomponents with CLIM presentations. They are quite different though. I have not used MobX, but I just browsed the intro page (yes it's way better at explaining what it is than CLIM is). CLIM doesn't really compare apples-to-apples with React/MobX, since the abstractions used are different, but they are both approaches to providing simple ways of presenting and manipulating domain state with a gui. In particular MobX actions and CLIM commands have some similarities, but also significant differences. Also, (assuming MobX doesn't change this) React is typically used to provide declarative rendering of the full application state. CLIM allows you to do this, but it is more common to have each bit of state declaratively rendered, while treating the UI state imperatively. This was absolutely necessary 20 years ago, and is still often a good idea today (look at some of the gymnastics Netflix has had to do to make long-lists render efficiently in React; with imperative state you can just keep appending and CLIM doesn't care because non-visible state won't get re-rendered until it is needed; granted some of that is also because the DOM is a different level of abstraction than a local GUI window...). On the other hand, after doing some javascript GUIs, I think I'll be more intentional about when I make this divide in CLIM applications; declarative GUIs are almost always easier to reason about.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

lf-non 9y ago

I just found your demo video about McCLIM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfBmRsPRdGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfBmRsPRdGg) and found it to very helpful to put things you outlined into perspective. I have linked to it in a top level comment.