20. Graphical User Interfaces
Many a Lisp “newbie” has been seen complaining that while COMMON LISP is a cool language, it is and always was pretty weak as far as graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are concerned. If you know a bit about the history of Lisp, this sounds quite ridiculous because the GUI of the famous Lisp Machines was written in Lisp and arguably way ahead of its time.1
What is true is that if nowadays you want to create graphical user interfaces that work equally well on a variety of operating systems, and if you want to do this without a lot of effort and also at no cost, then some other languages will offer far better environments for this task.2
Still, it is certainly neither impossible nor does it require Herculean efforts ...
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