Must read by Steve Yegge which brings some closure to the whole NBL, eating marshmallows, etc thread. He ends the post talking about 'NBE' which I predict to be an emacs clone written in Rhino / DHTML. Perhaps something like 9ne.

Conceptually I think the Rhino on Rails effort is interesting. In concrete terms, it is a bit depressing... but I find myself in the same position at my day job, wishing to work with dynamic languages, and compromising with something that will target the JVM.

It's so fascinating how we study and mine archaic technologies, only to cobble implementations together on top of our current static sub-optimal tools. Are computers inherently suited to Sisyphus-Oriented Programming, or do we lack vision?

A similar effort, perhaps broader in scope, is the work that Peter Fisk is doing on Vista Smalltalk. Every day I check out his progress and am floored and inspired... but at the end of the day, why are we re-implementing Lisp and Smalltalk in Flash and Silverlight? There are amazing implementations of both of these languages, but they run out outdated platforms ( traditional operating systems ).

I think the fundamental forces are controlling complexity, trust, managing risk, and fear of the unknown. Whatever platform we choose to build on top of gives us footing as well as imposing barriers on what is possible. You can plant your foot firmly on a rock, but you will have to climb a fortress, or you can stand in a ball of mud, where any expression is possible, but you might get lost. I am tired of walking on stepping stones lately...

Amazon EC2 Limited Beta has finally sent me an email that I will get access soon!

LispWorks on x86_64 Ubuntu feisty

I was just about to give up on trying to use LispWorks, because I couldn't get the CAPI GUI to start up on my beefy Ubuntu machine. Things had gone fine on Mac OS X, but I hit a huge road block with lesstif2 / Open Motif 2.1 on Ubuntu.

When I would start up

~/Library/LispWorks/lispworks-personal-5-0-1-x86-linux

I got a libXm.so missing error

Error during GUI startup:
 Could not register handle for external module X-UTILITIES::CAPIX11:
 libXm.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

or maybe it was libXm.so.2 ... Anywhoos, I Ubuntu already has lesstif2 installed, so I added /usr/lib to by LD_LIBRARY_PATH

LispWorks(R): The Common Lisp Programming Environment Personal Edition
Copyright (C) 1987-2006 LispWorks Ltd.  All rights reserved.
Version 5.0.1
Saved by LispWorks as lispworks-personal-5-0-1-x86-linux, at 09 Jan 2007 15:47
User auking on bigriver

Error: Could not register handle for external module X-UTILITIES::CAPIX11:
libXm.so.2: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64.
1 (abort) Quit process.

Type :b for backtrace, :c  to proceed,  or :? for other options

CL-USER 1 : 1 >

Okay, so it found the library, but they are 64 bit... Ahh. There are no 32 bit libraries to install.

Couple of days of trying different stuff when I had spare cycles. No dice.
Finally early this morning I found that editing lib/5-0-0-0/config/use-motif-library to

(:detect-version (("/usr/lib/libXm.so.2.0.1" :lesstif)
                 ("/usr/lib/libXm.so.3.0.2" :motif))
:prefer-version :motif
)

I was able to startup LispWorks on 64 bit linux.