What Language

With all the new changes coming to AutoCAD, I have read many a posts that say LISP is going by the wayside and to starting learning to program in the newer languages....

Since this is the case, what would be the best way to go? Visual LISP, ActiveX, VB, .Net???? Or something else. I know it will take quite a while for LISP to completely disappear, so totally abandoning it isn't the best choice, but incorporating it into newer languages into new programs is...

Any thoughts???

TIA

crrussell3

 

Been beat to death over and over and over again. Search the NG's. You're
extremely unlikely to hear any viewpoint in this new thread that hasn't
already been aired in detail previously.

 

Too many users (like me) out there that still depend on the lisp routines for their daily work.

 

Tom,

I wish I had kept all of the old Compuserve forum stuff. I bet I could
find threads back in the early '90s about 'AutoLisp is dead' Hey, I
still use DOS 80% of the time. -David

My CSI 73544.2655 is still active though I don't check it but once a
month or so.

 

I wish I had kept all of the old Compuserve forum stuff.

You got that right, David. The only one I saved was the classic thread on
clean programminng style, I think it was 30+ pages printed out, and I
studied that thing for a very long time.

 

I recently, and reluctantly, cancelled my old CompuServe account. No more
72017,3476. I started on CompuServe around 1987... way before the internet
caught on.

I seriously doubt that AutoLISP/Visual LISP will ever "die." Too many of
Autodesk's customers (us) depend upon it. They may stop supporting it, or
only provide maintenance improvements, as they have suggested, but they
won't drop it entirely any time soon.

 

Tom Smith wrote:

The only one I saved was the classic thread on > clean programminng style

Yep, I still have that as well as parts of the one on bitwise testing.

If I remember, someone burnt a cd of the entire forum before it shut
down. On a 56k dial up, that would have been tedious. Let' see, Tony
T. was the AutoLISP thread master..... That must have been '88 or '89

-David

 

I hope you are right as it is so very easy to create shortcut keys in
AutoLisp/Vlisp. My ACADDOC file has over 350 of them. I still use a DOS
word processor to do my coding in.

 

I remember someone burning off the CD and offering it to others
for price of the CD and postage. Amazing amount of information.

Anne

 

as soon as Autodesk moves all of their Express tools, and many of their Desktop tools away from autolisp, you can begin to get worried.
until then, there must be a good reason that things like the Layer Manager and SuperHatch are written in Lisp, right?

--Jeremiah

 

Do you get a quilt with it?

 

What do you mean by "as soon as Autodesk moves all of their Express
tools, and many of their Desktop tools away from autolisp" ??
Your cited examples are over 5 years old. ?????

What have you seen lately from Autodesk that's written entirely
or predominantly in LISP?

Do you see Autodesk using DCL for dialog boxes any longer?

 

Hi Daniel,

It was about 5 years ago that Autodesk looked at their policies about lisp
and whether it may be dropped.

The user reaction was very strong at that time and I have never seen the
slightest hint since then that they didn't listen.
Many messages from Autodesk staff in these NGs have made it quite clear that
they intend maintain lisp, while providing more and more functionality to
customise with other tools.

Hence what lisp does now will always be do-able and existing customisation
will work in the future.

I don't know if VLAX programs are ActiveX library sensitive. That could
require program maintenance between AutoCAD versions as in VBA.

Equally, a lot of simple lisp programs which saved our sanity in the 1980s
will be superseded by enhancements in the base program.

Last night in a house cleanup I threw out hundreds of pages of magazine
cuttings such as Bill Kramer's programs.
As I glanced at them, so many proved to be irrelevant in AutoCAD 2005.

--


Laurie Comerford
CADApps
www.cadapps.com.au

 

dude, the Express Layer Manager.
Maybe you should check it out someday.
when you also check your attitude.

--Jeremiah

 

in message

Well, that just serves to make my point, dude.

You said "as soon as Autodesk moves all of their Express tools, and many of their Desktop tools away from autolisp...".

Well, duh! In case you didn't notice, the functionality
of the express tools LMAN was moved into AutoCAD's
core, and its not written in LISP.

 

Which happened in AutoCAD 2000i, back in July 2000.

As you say, Lisp is in maintenance mode.

Terry

 

Tony, what are you talking about?
What "autocad core"? From the Express Tools menu, Layer Manager fires a Lisp utility that uses a DCL dialog.
As I originally said, when Acad removes that Lisp and DCL, then one can start to get worried. Also, there must be a good reason they chose to write the utilities in Lisp (and also why we, and I assume including you, choose to write in Lisp).

I really don't understand your attitude problem.

--Jeremiah

 

Well, you obviously don't know, do you!

It was written 5 years ago.

It is obsolete.

It can't be "removed" from AutoCAD because it
was never part of AutoCAD.

AutoCAD 2000i and later offer the functionality of
LMAN, without the need for LMAN, or any LISP/DCL.

In other words, they did exactly what you say they
haven't done - they replaced LMAN with something
else (Layer States) that is built into AutoCAD, and
is not written in LISP/DCL.


http://www.caddzone.com

AcadXTabs: MDI Document Tabs for AutoCAD 2004/2005
http://www.acadxtabs.com

 

<<What "autocad core"? From the Express Tools menu, Layer Manager fires a Lisp utility that uses a DCL dialog.
Which has been obsolete since AUTOCAD added that functionality to the core layer function in R2000i.


<<As I originally said, when Acad removes that Lisp and DCL, then one can start to get worried. >>

Then you need to be worried, ACAD did that over 4 years ago. The fact that you're still using four year old code instead of the core command is irrelevant.


<<there must be a good reason they chose to write the utilities in Lisp >>

As has been the case since V2, most of the "bonus/express" tools were not originally developed by AutoDESK, but rather offered as enhancements by other developers and users.

As far as Mr. Tanzillo's attitude is concerned It seemed merely informative to me.

 

Express Tools can hardly be called part of the "core." They're definitely in
maintenance mode, being slight reworks of the old Bonus Tools from circa
R14. They actually eliminated them from one version here recently, then
stuck them back in 2004 again. No new functionality of any significance has
been added in several versions now.

I don't have any pre-2K Acad versions installed anymore, but it looks to me
like there's a lot less lisp and dcl being used now than there used to be,
and again what is lingering on is very old stuff, from before the Bonus
Tools. As far as I can tell, they haven't done anything new in this area
since before vlisp appeared.

Personally, I never thought that any of the included utilities were written
in lisp because it was the optimal way to do things. I always asssumed that
they were intended in part as customization examples, and/or wound up being
implemented in lisp due to a time crunch in the development cycle.

I can understand the attitudes of the professional developers among us,
given the way the wind seems to be blowing. Acad isn't using lisp as a
development tool, and really never has. But for those us who only need to
"tweak" it to suit our purposes a little better -- as opposed to marketing
full-blown applications -- I hope they leave lisp alone, or at least replace
it with something equally lightweight and handy.

As far as lisp vs .NET, that seems to me to be an apples & oranges
comparison. My title is Architect, not Programmer. A very small percentage
of my time is spent on customizing Acad. If I need anything beyond what I
can crank out in lisp in a short while, then really I ought to be buying it
shrink-wrapped from somebody like Laurie or Tony instead of trying to
develop it myself. Aside from the fact that I don't a budget for programming
tools/SDK's/whatever that don't come included with Acad. Maybe I'm wrong,
but I don't see VBA as equivalent in handiness to lisp either.

Lisp has always been one of the strengths of Acad in terms on
non-professional-programmer customization. It offers a lot more than simple
scripts and menu macros do, and even folks who aren't into programming can
do quite a lot with simple (command "blah" "blah") routines. There will
always be a need for an included macro language along these lines. Maybe one
day VBA will be our only option in that regard, but I expect a lot of other
folks will be just as unhappy as me if and when that happens.