Lisp and the future of development environments at the EclipseCon conference
Thursday, February 5, 2004
I've been at EclipseCon in Anaheim all this week. Grady Booch gave the keynote speech "From IDE to XDE to CDE" on Wednesday. His talk walked us through the history of development environments. Going from command line and pre-IDE enviroments up through IDE's and XDE's (eXtended Development Environements) to CDE's (Collaborative Development Environments), it was a very entertaining historical tour (especially for those of us who have made the trip before). Interestingly, he made several comments about Lisp development environments during his keynote address. He specifically referenced MacLisp and Xerox InterLisp-D. To an essentially all Java audience, he said:
"For those of you looking at the future of development environments, I encourage you to go back and review some of the Xerox documentation for InterLisp-D"He then went on to comment on how we have a way to go yet before we can match what was offered in those early Lisp Machine development environments.
He finished his talk with some predictions about the future of development environments and how he felt they would be evolving (along with a discussion of a number of disruptive technological innovations that he felt would influence the evolution of development environments). Some of the innovations he discussed were:
- Disruptive Tools-related Technologies
- Deep semantic environments
- Pattern-centric development
- Aspect-oriented development
-
Disruptive Hardware Technologies
- Pervasive displays
- Telepresence
- Disruptive Communication Technologies
- Avatars
