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Jason Kantz

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Jun 5, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/5/00
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I recently received a message from an individual doing research outside of
the US. He had used Lisp many years ago and thought the language was dead.
He thanked me for the information I had available on the web because it
helped him decide to use Lisp for a project he was planning.

A recent thread on comp.lang.lisp diverted to the topic of whether students
get proper exposure to Lisp. While I don't consider "yahoo clubs" proper
exposure, and I don't ever expect Lisp to get hype like Java or C,
visibility here may provide a possibility of attracting other lost Lisp
souls.

Right now Lisp isn't even in the list of programming languages.

You can help by signing in at

http://clubs.yahoo.com/

and joining

http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/lisp

Thanks,

Jason Kantz

David Bakhash

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Jun 6, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/6/00
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"Jason Kantz" <ja...@kantz.com*no-spam-please> writes:

You didn't look hard enough! I think I started the first Lisp club on
Yahoo months ago. It's called Common Lisp. Search Yahoo! Clubs, and
you'll see it.

I just never advertised it.

dave

David Bakhash

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Jun 6, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/6/00
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(anyway, I'm kinda thinking that "Lisp" is too general, and I want to
focus my attention on CL, in particular)

Martin Cracauer

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Jun 6, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/6/00
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"Jason Kantz" <ja...@kantz.com*no-spam-please> writes:

>I recently received a message from an individual doing research outside of
>the US. He had used Lisp many years ago and thought the language was dead.
>He thanked me for the information I had available on the web because it
>helped him decide to use Lisp for a project he was planning.

I don't want to discourage you, but a person doing research and
missing the existing Web/Usenet presense of Lisp... There's not much
you can do about such people.

>A recent thread on comp.lang.lisp diverted to the topic of whether students
>get proper exposure to Lisp. While I don't consider "yahoo clubs" proper
>exposure, and I don't ever expect Lisp to get hype like Java or C,
>visibility here may provide a possibility of attracting other lost Lisp
>souls.

I think it is wrong to stick one's nose into Lisp before he's got
problems to solve that are more elegant to implement in Lisp. If you
do, you might discourage him and loose a person who could have jumped
on the Lisp bandwagon later. Especially, if most he wants is to stack
Unix/Win32 system calls and doesn't have much own program logic in
between, he will get a bad impression of Lisp.

Martin
--
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <crac...@bik-gmbh.de> http://www.bik-gmbh.de/~cracauer/
FreeBSD - where you want to go. Today. http://www.freebsd.org/

Erik Naggum

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Jun 6, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/6/00
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* crac...@counter.bik-gmbh.de (Martin Cracauer)

| Especially, if most he wants is to stack Unix/Win32 system calls and
| doesn't have much own program logic in between, he will get a bad
| impression of Lisp.

But this should be one of the easier things to fix, right? Apart
from the overpowering desire to redesign the often incredibly stupid
system call interfaces which could slow down any programmer, there's
nothing substantial to make Common Lisp less suitable to chat with
system calls than C is.

#:Erik
--
If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.

Martin Cracauer

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Jun 6, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/6/00
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Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> writes:

>* crac...@counter.bik-gmbh.de (Martin Cracauer)
>| Especially, if most he wants is to stack Unix/Win32 system calls and
>| doesn't have much own program logic in between, he will get a bad
>| impression of Lisp.

> But this should be one of the easier things to fix, right? Apart
> from the overpowering desire to redesign the often incredibly stupid
> system call interfaces which could slow down any programmer, there's
> nothing substantial to make Common Lisp less suitable to chat with
> system calls than C is.

The existing interfaces to the APIs of specific Unix derivates or
Win32 are not complete enough. At the very least, specialities of one
Unix derivate are not as easily #ifdef'ed in existing API bindings.
Some Alien interfaces have overhead. The default streams of Common
Lisp cannot be easily integrated with Unix file descriptors (the scsh
paper is enlightend here). Doing anything by single-byte-I/O through
multiple CLOS layers requires special actions from the programmer.

Remember that I talked about beginners here, they certainly use a
textbook about Unix system calls and those textbooks use C. What is
worse is that the concurrency models most Unix textbooks teach are not
usable when doing the same thing in Common Lisp.

I don't say that things like CL-HTTP shouldn't be done in Lisp, they
are about contents. A person who wants to do a simple file descriptor
pushing program is not the right one to point to Lisp. He may be
disappointed and not try Lisp again later, while he might come to Lisp
later when his demand are more content-based than at the beginning.

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