C Y writes:
Perhaps you could consider your work on McCLIM to be the necessary preliminary work for Climacs/Gsharp? ;-)
Nice try :-)
A score editor certainly has some limited audience, but it could be a killer app to its particular audience. For that, it needs to work properly, which is why I was planning to work on it a bit more this year.
But CAN it work properly without a revamped and robust McCLIM?
Yes, I think so. I mean, McCLIM is quite stable (in the sense that it is not crashing) and usable. The main problem for Gsharp is that I have had to write more code than I would have wanted to get around current problems with McCLIM. Of course, at some point, it becomes more advantageous to fix McCLIM than to write workarounds.
In open source terms, I still think the ideal "killer app" would be an advanced mathematical document interface. However, that's non-trivial in virtually every way imaginable, and would only attract a few developers. rtoy has broken the ice with a basic interface to Maxima, but a "killer app" level interface would be months and months of work, some of it extremely involved.
Nice project, definitely.
for McCLIM to take off it should be sufficiently robust to not cause new users any major frustrations beyond learning it in the first place. I personally think the next step should be taken - integrate the spec with the code itself, and iron out any bugs/limitations in the spec that present themselves.
There are of course many ways of integrating the code and the spec. There are places in the current code with references to the spec, but I am guessing you want to go further than that. I am not sure I see how such integration would have a major impact on the maintainability of the code, though.