Frequently Asked Questions

First of all, Moxie makes no distinction between triggers, aliases, and macros. We treat all of these things in the same way: as a plugin.

All plugins are written in Common Lisp, so you'll have to have some grounding in Lisp to do anything serious at the moment (although I have some ideas for simpler interfaces for the non-programming-minded in the future). There are a few support routines included in the MOXIE package to simplify common plugin tasks, such as triggers and aliases.

Because I didn't want to have to write my own language for triggers, aliases, and macros. No matter how much I worked on it, I wasn't going to get the kind of programmability I wanted without embedding a full programming language. I also think it's something of a waste of time to learn a new language just for the purpose of programming a trigger in your MUX client.

I could have just used AppleScript as the language of choice, and came very close to doing so a number of times, but I had too much trouble trying to get AS and ObjC talking as well as I'd liked, and, frankly, I don't consider it to be full-featured enough.

So I chose to embed a language. There are, theoretically, a fair number of popular languages I could have embedded, however, I chose Lisp for the following reasons:

• Real-time development. I feel that, in the scope of Moxie, having a fully interactive development style is extremely useful. As far as I know, this excludes PERL as a possibility.
• Lisp has been ratified by ANSI, and is one of the few languages to do so. It has a very large "library" that is standard from one lisp implementation to the next, so as long as you've found code that's "Common Lisp" you've found code that will work with Moxie.
• Lisp is the second-oldest language still in use, after FORTRAN. While not the largest consideration, it does guarantee that there's a fair amount of code available for free in the world. Emacs, for example, has a huge amount of contributed Emacs-Lisp code (which, while not common-lisp, is often easily ported).
• And finally, because I can. I like Lisp, and I'm writing Moxie, so I get to pick. "Give me real macros, or give me death!"

There are a number of web sites devoted to Lisp programming. Below, I'll list a few resources that should get you pointed in the right direction:

• CLiki's Online Tutorial page can get you started if you're completely new.
• Paul Graham has a lot of information on Lisp, including a free book for the more serious programmers.

The REPL is your direct interface to the Lisp sub-system. It is the key to fully interactive programming. Via the REPL you can input Lisp commands directly and see the results - any Lisp will work here, including function definitions. This allows you to write a function, test it, and debug it, all without leaving the REPL, and with a much finer grain of control than with a compile cycle.