Daniel J Pezely wrote:
I'm not expecting business executives to attend presentations by Lisp programmers.
Ok, I understand now. And considering the amount of effort I've put into making Chicken Scheme end-user friendly, the packaging problems are definitely non-trivial. XEmacs has a packaging system; in theory I could have gotten my Scheme modes from that. In practice, the packaging download mechanism is broken on my Windows installation, due to some perverse interaction with MSYS. It shouldn't be happening, because XEmacs is installed natively and shouldn't know about my MSYS environment. So I had to manually install it, which wasn't hard as it's explained on the XEmacs site pretty well, but it increases the 'chore' level. For sanity I also had to configure cua-mode.el to get the Ctrl-Z Ctrl-X Ctrl-C Ctrl-V behavior I'm used to. Can't abide learning a whole new way to use my fingers. So that required the full learning curve about how to configure site-specific .el files. Plus I had to check whether cua-mode.el worked with XEmacs; at one point I was led to believe that it didn't. There's that GNU Emacs / XEmacs compatibility paranoia. In principle, XEmacs is better for a Windows developer than GNU Emacs. In practice, it's not off-the-shelf. For awhile I was going to use SchemeScript in Eclipse, on the principle that Windows users would find Eclipse more palatable than XEmacs. But the plugin never worked properly for me. I gave up several months ago and accepted XEmacs, which I had been resisting for a long time. I still crank up Visual Studio because it has an easier-to-use Find In Files function than a grep command line. Plus every time I try to bind grep to a keystroke, my settings aren't saved! More futzing. It takes awhile to get rid of the handicaps in XEmacs. Especially if you're busy and mainly worried about slinging your code. Cheers, Brandon Van Every