No, it's not just you. Most Lisper thought that way. But the target weren't Lisp developers, it were C++/Apple Pascal developers. Basically similar purposes which Java was designed for: general 'mainstream' application/OS developers from mobile systems upwards. Management did not think that an s-expression-based syntax would be a success with developers used to use Pascal, C and C++.
> The IDE was really written in CL? Huh. I'd have thought that they would have gone the self-hosting route.
The new language was emerging and targeting the new hardware platforms.
You can think of it that it was similar with the Playstation games from Naughty Dog - for example Crash Bandicoot. The platform for the software was the Game Object Oriented Lisp on Playstation and the development environment were desktop computers running and IDE based on Allegro Common Lisp.
The dev environment were Macs. The developers were often Lisper and Apple bought the technology and the people. Even the later product version development environment 'Newton Toolkit' was originally developed in Common Lisp.
There were stranger things then. I once saw a version of Microsoft Word for Macintosh on a developer CD, written in Common Lisp. It was a relatively sophisticated User Interface mockup. It looked like the real MS Word for Mac, but lacked much of the functionality. But when you looked at the application file on the bit level, you could see that it was a Macintosh Common Lisp runtime/image. It was written by or for Microsoft. Long ago.
I should probably look into Swift at some point, but I've never found the time, and I find languages like Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, JS, Haskell, CL, and Scheme far more compelling.
No, it's not just you. Most Lisper thought that way. But the target weren't Lisp developers, it were C++/Apple Pascal developers. Basically similar purposes which Java was designed for: general 'mainstream' application/OS developers from mobile systems upwards. Management did not think that an s-expression-based syntax would be a success with developers used to use Pascal, C and C++.
> The IDE was really written in CL? Huh. I'd have thought that they would have gone the self-hosting route.
The new language was emerging and targeting the new hardware platforms.
You can think of it that it was similar with the Playstation games from Naughty Dog - for example Crash Bandicoot. The platform for the software was the Game Object Oriented Lisp on Playstation and the development environment were desktop computers running and IDE based on Allegro Common Lisp.
The dev environment were Macs. The developers were often Lisper and Apple bought the technology and the people. Even the later product version development environment 'Newton Toolkit' was originally developed in Common Lisp.
There were stranger things then. I once saw a version of Microsoft Word for Macintosh on a developer CD, written in Common Lisp. It was a relatively sophisticated User Interface mockup. It looked like the real MS Word for Mac, but lacked much of the functionality. But when you looked at the application file on the bit level, you could see that it was a Macintosh Common Lisp runtime/image. It was written by or for Microsoft. Long ago.