On Thu, 15 Mar 2018 06:56:21 +0000 (UTC)
arnuld <sun...@invalid.address> wrote:
> 6 or some years ago, I used to post Common Lisp code on this newsgroup
> and I remember people replying with better code and better ideas. At that
> time I used to be on comp.object too because I was interested in CLOPS
> and MOP. Today I see comp.lang.lisp seems dead :( . No good post in this
> new year.
I consider good any post from which I learn new stuff or makes me consider
[reasonable] view points I hadn't considered before. With this criterion ,
comp.lang.lisp had plenty of those although the overall activity is lower
than what it used to be in years past. Also , any on topic post will receive
replies so I think it's absurd to call the group dead.
For a very recent example , what do you think of <
lz4llti...@gnu.org> ?
I think it's a very good post. It is mainly a general algorithmic one rather
than Lisp specific but who cares , you saw it here first.
> comp.object died several years ago because people moved onto better
> things,
Yeah , functional is the new black.
> newsgroup to forums and IRC, OO to something else. AI and
> Robotics boom (2nd boom to be exact) has finally come after a long gap,
> Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Neural Networks are the buzzwords
> these days. Lisp is the language of AI, Uncle John McCarthy created it to
> solve AI problems in first place and I was expecting this newsgroup to
> be much busier now. But what happened ?
Are you sure that's why he created it ? I thought he was just doing theoretical
work and someone else [a student of his ?] used that to write an actual working
Lisp interpreter.
Anyway , as has been pointed out on this group many times , many of the
aspects which made Lisp languages special , other languages now have them
too. To my surprise , many people [including Peter Norvig apparently] aren't
that bothered about powerful metaprogramming facilities. The latter was one
of the main things which attracted me to Lisp.
I note finally , that if the activity on a discussion forum is not influenced
by which are the latest buzzwords then that's probably a good thing. The
buzzwords may be such for good reasons , namely refer to things which will
have lasting value , but some people will be drawn to them just because they
are buzzwords and not because they are interested in the underlying depth [if
such exists] .