The cirCLe CD is on hold pending a rethink#

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 15:37:44 +0000

The cirCLe CD is on hold pending a rethink. Response from the survey showed lots (well, some few tens) of existing CL users who thought it would be neat, plus a few people who might want to try it for curiosity's sake (personal favourite: the person who wanted a Genera clone for $25) but neither of these is sufficient evidence of a sustainable market. Maybe I'm asking the wrong questions; almost certainly I'm asking them in the wrong place.

So, Marketing 101: products have features but customers actually want benefits. (Unless, for some reason, the feature in question is XML, but I digress). So, what are the benefits of Lisp? What's our USP?

I think the answer is interactive development: in particular for Web application development, where the usual state of the art seems to be either error reporting on the web page itself (which is a start, provided you can turn it off in production - do you want your customers reading your backtraces?) or dumping stuff in a log file. So I've been experimenting with SLIME and Araneida with the intention that (a) errors in Araneida handlers can be debugged using the Slime debugger, (b) Slime can connect across the network (SSH-tunnelled) to a long-lived server process. Some progress to report on (a): it works, but nothing is in CVS yet

Also today, set up a Paypal account: dan@metacircles.com. Not altogether sure what I'm hoping that people will send me money for: if you've solved a problem (or just enjoyed) using CLiki or SBCL (threads, sockets, CLX, Alpha, PPC) or Araneida or cclan or asdf or detachtty or ... and want to fund further development, now you have a mechanism. It might also be a good idea if you sent me email saying which of these you're using: not that your $40 is going to significantly influence my development whim, but in the aggregate your collective $4000 might.

Thanks, by the way, go to Erik Enge for renewing the cliki.net domain when i managed to miss the reminders for it.