Re: Industry versus academia

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

Sundar Narasimhan wrote:

>Dan: (a) may be true, but you are perhaps wrong about (b). You can buy
>and build on such things today.
>
I'd be interested in knowing more about that.  What products exist that 
do the kind of "automatic
programming" you're talking about, that are being used by "mainline" 
customers like insurance
companies and stock exchanges and banks and phone companies?

>
>   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 :)
>
Yeah, I did not expect the OTI guys to write the plug-in.  I just 
thought some good-hearted
open-source guy out there would do it and publish it somehow.  So many 
Eclipse users,
and so many Gnu Emacs users; it just seems to be crying out to be done.

> (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).
>
Done.