On Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:57:02 -0800, Jeff wrote: > You are right, that does seem to be happening; however, unless the lisp > community has a breadth of good open source tools and libraries it won't > ever arrive at lisp. I think with SBCL, slime and a lot of the good > libs that exist now things are close, but with this kind of response on > the mailing list to someone like myself who I think represents a large > portion of the Ruby/Python communities, it's not looking good.
I have not followed your thread but you seem to be new here (I'm not as new!) Please take Kenny's responses to be indicative of.. Kenny. Not cll nor Lisp users in general.
Once you get past that, he is quite entertaining. I'm still waiting for him to get back to me about me calling him uncivilized (after he called me a peeing fish or something.) I think after that, he put me in his kill file :-)
I agree that the OSS Lisp offerings need to be strong and I think they are. Better than Python anyway (except for the batteries included part.) Having worked in the Visual C++ world for far too long, they are definitely better than that side of the world.
By "they" I mean development tools like Emacs, Slime and SBCL. You have OSS libraries for most things but definitely not as many as Python. Actually, I don't even know what is missing as I haven't needed anything that isn't written in CL.
How about you port Rails to Lisp and lets take it from there? :-)
Sometimes they are over the top. FORMAT is an example where using parentheses would be over the top, also loop is better than lots of parentheses. Maybe also arithmetic expressions - look at all the infix projects.
I recently wrote a lexical analyser. I used nested expressions for defining the regular expressions and it was kind of klunky. So maybe regexes are another example where parentheses are too cumbersome.
> Why is (2) an objection to use one of the commercial implementations? > Have you ever tried one of them? LispWorks, for example, is centered > around an Emacs editor (a Hemlock descendant, actually). Basically, > it's just an Emacs written in Common Lisp. And of course you can > rebind keys.
Has anyone written a paredit equivalent for the LW editor. I keep giving LW second chances, and keep running up against not having paredit, and giving up, and deciding that wasn't really a fair test, and lathering, rinsing and repeating. I'm not sure I'm so motivated to try it that I want to spend a lot of time learning how to customize it well enough to port paredit over, though.
On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 07:18:07 +0100, Sohail Somani <soh...@taggedtype.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:57:02 -0800, Jeff wrote:
>> You are right, that does seem to be happening; however, unless the lisp >> community has a breadth of good open source tools and libraries it won't >> ever arrive at lisp. I think with SBCL, slime and a lot of the good >> libs that exist now things are close, but with this kind of response on >> the mailing list to someone like myself who I think represents a large >> portion of the Ruby/Python communities, it's not looking good.
There have been enough threads on this topic on cll already, yet I feel your discussion lacks a few points:
(1) The CL library landscape is good, but in some areas confusing as there are several libraries doing the same thing (all those utilities libs (cl-utilities, pod-utils, kt-utils etc) or take the recent question about ffis.).
The list of recommended libraries on Cliki [1] is a good starting point, but lacks good libraries like bordeaux-threads, cl-cairo2, cl-opengl, cl-weblocks, clg, etc. The CL Gardeners [2] address the same question, but IMO it is hard to find concrete information on that site.
(2) Some libraries are hard to find (eg. for cello, celtk, cells you need the link to cvs. Searching the archives of the cells-devel list is your best bet.)
ASDF-Install is obviously the answer to the retrieve/install problem, but again, a (more complete) list of recommended libraries would help. Some people do an amazing job of keeping their packages up to date, other projects seem not to have the ressources.
(3) Keeping libraries up to date is non-trivial
Maybe I missed it: Is there an (asdf-install:upgrade) that updates all my asdf-install'd packages?
(4) According to the thread on GUI programming there is no satisfying GUI solution at this point. (Again, there are several, but each has its own problems. This is confusing for the newbie: Which one do I take? Where is the best community?)
The advent of webapps surely remedies this point, but there are still a number of use cases where one needs the full power of a local GUI (e.g graphic intense stuff). Lisp is highly suitable to dynamic UIs, but currently there is no easy way to do it. clg lacks cells, celtk looks unacceptable with tk<=8.4 on linux, cells-gtk is not quite complete (e.g. drawing), cello has only few widgets.
(5) Emacs/Slime is powerful ... but - the threshhold is *high*. Weird keybindings, the minibuffer, ... all that takes some time to get used to. - to get antialiasing on linux you need an unofficial snapshot build (!) - lisp-specific features need custom extensions (paredit etc.) that need to be installed manually
Again, I know there are lisp-in-a-box distros, but as soon as you want to customize it a little you find yourself digging knee-deep in config files.
I would describe myself as quite ready to adopt new technologies, but it took me about six months of being constantly upset about one thing or another in cusp [3] until I finally decided to get started with emacs.
In case you wonder: I'm doing my share extending cells-gtk to include a few more involved widgets like a tree-view based on cells and drawing-areas supporting cairo and opengl.
But it'd be great if more people in the lisp world cared to share their experience -- and if people could get together to keep things like the list of recommended libraries up to date.
> I have not followed your thread but you seem to be new here (I'm not as > new!) Please take Kenny's responses to be indicative of.. Kenny. Not cll > nor Lisp users in general.
> Once you get past that, he is quite entertaining. I'm still waiting for > him to get back to me about me calling him uncivilized (after he called > me a peeing fish or something.) I think after that, he put me in his kill > file :-)
> I agree that the OSS Lisp offerings need to be strong and I think they > are. Better than Python anyway (except for the batteries included part.) > Having worked in the Visual C++ world for far too long, they are > definitely better than that side of the world.
> By "they" I mean development tools like Emacs, Slime and SBCL. You have > OSS libraries for most things but definitely not as many as Python. > Actually, I don't even know what is missing as I haven't needed anything > that isn't written in CL.
> How about you port Rails to Lisp and lets take it from there? :-)
On Jan 20, 5:22 am, Edi Weitz <spamt...@agharta.de> wrote:
> LispWorks, for example, is centered around an Emacs editor (a > Hemlock descendant, actually). Basically, it's just an Emacs > written in Common Lisp. And of course you can rebind keys.
(Now, these instructions are a bit outdated... I recall I had to look up how to do the -init thing in the Lispwork docs. Can't remember, sorry. But they're basically correct.)
So I have my paredit and whatnot. (I don't think that Lispworks's editor is that extendable? Or am I wrong?)
On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:15:15 -0800 (PST), Tayssir John Gabbour <tayssir.j...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I don't think that Lispworks's editor is that extendable? Or am I > wrong?
I think you're wrong. Why should an editor that is written in Common Lisp and comes with source code not be extendable? Admittedly, GNU Emacs has a better framework for extensions and more existing support code, though.
Edi.
--
European Common Lisp Meeting, Amsterdam, April 19/20, 2008
Jeff wrote: > On Jan 19, 11:45 pm, Ken Tilton <kennytil...@optonline.net> wrote:
... >>What have you /not/ been smoking? The herd is chasing from language to >>language trying to find Lisp; it is Lisp itself that is sucking them in, >>and nothing else.
> You are right, that does seem to be happening; however, unless the > lisp community has a breadth of good open source tools and libraries > it won't ever arrive at lisp.
Please study that paragraph of yours and think a little: How is it that the whole programming language thing is converging on Lisp with nothing out there but half-baked, incomplete, abandoned open source libraries and tools?
It's the /idea/ dude, not the infrastructure. Java succeeded in part because Sun provided lotsa infrastructure (the other part was being like C but safer and having GC), but Python and Ruby succeeded by being more fun to work with (including being more interactive, less type-obsessed, yadda, yadda). Absent a Sun, a Great Thing grows by being great so Real Programmers see it is worth it to roll up their sleeves and Just Use It, libraries or no. Some are smart enough to put some energy into bridges to other worlds, such as CFFI and Verrazano, to jump start the infrastructure.
I think with SBCL, slime and a lot of
> the good libs that exist now things are close, but with this kind of > response on the mailing list to someone like myself who I think > represents a large portion of the Ruby/Python communities, it's not > looking good.
Sure, Lisp would have been designated by he US DOD to replace Ada by now if Kenny was not so mean to noobs on c.l.l. That is a feature of my plan to keep Lisp to myself, not a bug. Meanwhile...
Jeez, all I did was make fun of the idea that using free software is liberating as opposed to enslaving*, and I did so on Usenet. You now feel personally put-upon, offended, attacked, blah blah blah. I don't think it works that way.
kt
* When I was in college a shade-tree mechanic could still work on their own car. I did so, to save money. My net result was cash negative thanks to screw-ups, and that was with the standard FSF rate of zero for my time. Something like that. k
Sohail Somani wrote: > I have not followed your thread but you seem to be new here (I'm not as > new!) Please take Kenny's responses to be indicative of.. Kenny. Not cll > nor Lisp users in general.
Thanks! But be careful taunting cll users in general like that, they'll be on you like a Frisco zoo tiger.
> Once you get past that, he is quite entertaining. I'm still waiting for > him to get back to me about me calling him uncivilized (after he called > me a peeing fish or something.) I think after that, he put me in his kill > file :-)
On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:09:35 +0000, tim Josling wrote: > The parenthesis notation was supposed to be a temporary solution for > lisp until a more algebraic notation that was good enough could be > found.
PLT scheme has "Honu", although I'm not entirely sure why: it doesn't seem to be used for anything in particuar within the PLT universe. Maybe it was just put in as a proof that it was possible? Mabe it supports the Java and Algol "Teachpacks".
