Re: Industry versus academia

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

   direction, for sure.  But I'm just pointing out that (a) it has been an 
   exciting research direction
   for around thirty years already, and (b) it is still  not something that 
   one can go out and buy.

   That said, sure, it sounds great.

Dan: (a) may be true, but you are perhaps wrong about (b). You can buy
and build on such things today.

   Absolutely.  When I first looked at Eclipse last summer I was susprised 
   that there was no
   Gnu Emacs plugin.  Is there STILL no Gnu Emacs plugin?  That's so weird 
   that it makes
   me wonder whether there isn't some deeper reason, e.g. maybe the Eclipse 
   plug-in story
   isn't quite as rosy as they'd have you believe?  But I don't really know 
   anything much about it...

OTI -- the company that is now part of IBM that wrote most of
SWT/Eclipse base initially -- has (Lisp-like) NIH syndrome too :) (The
longest debates I've seen/read about/participated along those lines
have been to get that team abandon their ENVY code base and support
CVS. The fact that some IBM manager saw the light and made them do
this makes me hope that they will see the light wrt. Emacs too -- and
yes, I'm trying to make this happen thru official and unofficial
channels :) (vote for bug# 32589 on www.eclipse.org).