Medley External Weekly @ Wed, November 26, 2025 agenda

[Paolo Amoroso]

Some agenda ideas for the Medley External Weekly @ Wed, November 26, 2025 meeting:

• prospective University of Alberta undergrad student
• new Medley primer announcement
• annual report
• Lisp experience poll
• roundtable

The latest agenda is available in the shared document. If you have any other items feel free to add them to the document or share them here.

Join the meeting here https://meet.google.com/eyk-bfkj-rvb

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Paolo Amoroso | Blog | Mastodon

[Paolo Amoroso]

The links we shared in the meeting:

• Most Popular Programming Languages: Data from 1958 to 2025
• Lisp experience poll
• Bitsavers' Big Book of Bit Saving

[pixel...@gmail.com]

Sorry I missed the meeting today, I had planned to attend.
My health has been up and down lately (nothing serious)

Re: The Poll
The responses there sure went into the weeds of Clojure vs Common Lisp.
For what it's worth stylistically I'd say Interlisp is the polar opposite of Clojure culturally and stylistically.
It might be a harder sell...

Clojurians (/usually/ favor)
0. Immutable symbols and containers. (You don't set the value of anything once bound)
1. Using untyped hashmaps instead of Classes and Structs/Records. They consider OOP "bad" overall. 
2. HEAVY use of Tacit programming via threading macros (sometimes more than s-expressions).
3. A hesitation with macros. (Quite different from Lisp traditionally being the "Programmable Programming Language")
4. keywords over symbols.  {:foo 32 :bar 56}
5. Less familiarity with quoting semantics (Lists are a bit of a rare data structure to be created outright, favoring vectors with different quoting semantics)
6. Concurrency as their data structures being immutable eliminates a whole branch of issues.
7. Hashmap parsers rather than using functional composition.
8. Literal values over predicate functions.

Again that's not everyone but Hickey has made a very opinionated Lisp that has a culture built for people with a background in Haskell, Java and ML dialects.
The biggest hurdle in my opinion is getting them to see that there is no perfect paradigm for every program.
Many of them have an insular teaching that Lisp is always a Functional (in the modern paradigm sense) programming language but a simple browse of PROG and SETQ usage would correct that history. (Much of Interlisp is stylsitically Imperative)

That's just my dollar's worth of 2 cents as a former Clojure programmer at work.

The Common Lispers should be reasonably at home. (and have a good bit of "Home" already included)

- Ryan

[Paolo Amoroso]

Interestingly, in the poll question I explicitly mentioned Emacs Lisp as I anticipated people would wonder about it and assume Clojure is a Lisp. Instead it was the other way around. 😀

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[pixel...@gmail.com]

In my opinion it's in the Scheme branch (*very* roughly) but with a focus on immutability and a cultural preference for hashmap literals over objects. However, it inherits Common Lisp's macros with some syntax difference. I still consider it a Lisp with a opinionated author.

I think the real value of your poll was insight into how we approach people from other Lisps. Knowing how other Lisps work helps build bridges I suppose. I'm certainly not an expert but I've written projects in Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Clojure, VisualLISP, uLisp and am obtaining my Learners' Permit in InterLisp.