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There is an explanation in the blog: https://coalton-lang.github.io/20260424-mine/

> However, the above is a tall order for someone just wanting to dip their toes in, to see if they have any interest in Coalton or Common Lisp. A couple hours on the weekend is easily sunk into getting configurations right, and the right subsystems installed, and the right paths setup, just so the first line of code can be executed.

> mine is not Emacs. It aims to eliminate all of that, and be a Coalton/Lisp-first development environment, whose only job is to be a Coalton/Lisp-first development environment. But more than that, it needs to be accessible. A non-programmer should find it easy to download, install, and run mine with nothing more than a download link.


> mine is not Emacs.

Ah… yes, okay, I see what they did there… chuckle, sigh. Well, it's arguably in the same grand cultural tradition as EINE and ZWEI at least!


I vaguely remember that there was also TRES. EINE = Eine Is Not Emacs

ZWEI = Zwei Was Eine Initially

TRES = Tres Replaces Eine’s Successor



Why would a non-programmer want to download, install and run a CL IDE?

1. It is a potential first step on the way from non-programmer to programmer.

2. "Easy enough for a non-programmer" may also say something about how easy it is for a programmer.


I think the number of non-programmers who think 'I want to learn to program; I'll start with common lisp but emacs is too difficult!' is so small it is not a group worth considering. It's probably MIT & Stanford undergrads?

It's their IDE and they can design it how they want, but that's a weird goal for a CL IDE.


"It should be easy enough for" sets a UX bar, not a target audience. Kind of like the English phrase "X is so easy that even a toddler could do it," regardless of whether such a statement is figurative or literal.

You haven't seen the Lisp subreddit then, there is a post complaining about having to learn Emacs at least once every week or so.

I personally suspect that the overwhelming majority of those complaining would find a different reason to not learn lisp if the Emacs barrier were removed, but I very much might be wrong.

I wanted to avoid Emacs so I discovered Lem (so now I live in a different Emacs when writing CL), so it's not always this way

OpenLook is nice but it's a bit of a shame it doesn't have its own version of Workbench.


Acorn’s UNIX had the IXI desktop, which was, back then, the absolute pinnacle of user friendly Unix. IIRC, IBM’s AIX for the PS/2 also had it or something very similar.


A base becomes useless pretty quickly if it can't be resupplied, I suspect there is enough hostile AA around it to ensure that.


There is the Heroic Game Launcher that also interfaces with the Epic Games Store.


To me GOG needs a big picture mode like Steam. I want my PC to act like a console and that would help a lot


Why not just add the GOG games to Steam as non Steam games? Isnt that better anyway than having to launch GOG from the Steam BPM just to launch a game from their BPM?

Why would i want to launch a seperate launcher to launch my games?


At least one of the lead developers of Étoilé moved on to CHERI.



Haiku is not related to Étoilé.


It's not technologically feasible unless plastic aka flexible ICs take off.


Why?

It seems to me that if there were as much of a customer base for custom ICs as there is for PCBs, a fabricator like TSMC could easily offer a batch prototyping service on a 28 nm node, where you buy just a small slice of a wafer, provided you keep to some restrictive design and packaging rules.


They already do offer that - it’s called a multi-project wafer or MPW. But it’s prohibitively expensive on a per-chip basis. It’s mostly used for prototyping or concept proving and not for commercial use.

One problem is, you need to create a photolithography mask set for any volume size of fabrication and those aren’t cheap. But that’s far from the _only_ problem with small volume.


Azul Systems was making Java machines a while ago.


When did they add that? When I was trying to learn Japanese 6-7 years ago Duolingo didn’t have anything for either kana or kanji…


I remember reading or hearing somewhere that this was a one-off thing, but I can't remember where.

EDIT: Another comment mentioned Chet Faliszek, he was probably the source.


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