6 ms·

What on earth happened to this project? It looked really promising. Is it all left to racket now?

brudgers 11y ago
Common Lisp has a standard. The most recent major work on standards may be ISLisp. http://www.islisp.info/ http://www.islisp.info/ Creating a consensus language specificatoin is hard. It takes a community of people willing to work over a long period of time in very detailed ways. Throwing a proposal up on Github is unlikely to create a community and organization with the required commitments.
jlarocco 11y ago
For me personally, I'm already used to the ugly CL syntax that it's working around (hashes), already familiar and comfortable with the underlying libraries it's using (cl-ppcre, etc.), or don't find the features particularly useful (laziness, etc.). TBH, if I found those things annoying enough to seek out this library, I would probably just use Clojure or some other language.
- ScottBurson 11y ago
  That's the problem with any CL cleanup project: it's mostly going to appeal to newcomers to CL, who don't already have a large code base in the language, full of their own macros that address at least a few of the same issues. Not that CL couldn't use cleaning up. But to really make the new dialect popular, you'd have to focus on attracting new users, which would require things like writing books, or at least updating some of the existing books (e.g. Peter Seibel's). In short, defining and implementing the new dialect is only the first step of a long slog.
  - OopsCriticality 11y ago
    Speaking of books, have you by chance read Weitz's new one? https://www.apress.com/9781484211779 https://www.apress.com/9781484211779
    - akkadmed 11y ago
      Worth it.
  - dwc 11y ago
    > mostly going to appeal to newcomers to CL ... you'd have to focus on attracting new users It's my observation that CL regularly attracts new users, who grumble a bit at first and then fall in love. Then they drift away to other langs, keeping an affection for sexps, macros, and the numerous elegant aspects of CL. But drift away they do. IMO, if CL could keep more of the people who learn it well enough to love it, then it would be thriving. I have some opinions on why people drift away and how that could be addressed but they're not especially well formed at this time.
    - ScottBurson 11y ago
      > I have some opinions on why people drift away and how that could be addressed but they're not especially well formed at this time. I would like to hear them nonetheless.
      - dwc 11y ago
        I would rather not say until I've thought it out some more. A bag of mushy thoughts with a grain of truth in them would probably be provocative and wouldn't provide much utility for the CL community. Instead, here's one of the things that started me thinking about this... Some years back, Xach created the library manager Quicklisp, filling a huge hole in the lisp ecosystem. It's nice work and quickly became the defacto standard. Lots good to say about it and nothing bad, really. The thing that got me thinking was that this actually needed to be done at the time Xach did it. CL had been around a long time officially and even longer unofficially, and this really important piece of infrastructure had not been done. How could that be? "How could that be?" leads to more questions, and possible answers, and some loose ideas about moving forward. That's where I'm at, and I don't want to say more until I have something concrete and constructive. I wouldn't mind having a speculative conversation (that would help me greatly), but I think throwing out half baked ideas would do nothing more than the existing corpus of "why lisp isn't successful" blog posts, so I don't want to have that conversation somewhere like HN.
    - mvc 11y ago
      This is pretty close to my story. Had a lot of fun programming CL. Even worked with "His Kennyness" and Hans Huebner for a while. But I was young and needed to experience different dev cultures so I went and did some Rails for a while. I dream of meeting someone who wants to build something like mesos on top of cells.

Common Lisp has a standard. The most recent major work on standards may be ISLisp. http://www.islisp.info/ http://www.islisp.info/ Creating a consensus language specificatoin is hard. It takes a community of people willing to work over a long period of time in very detailed ways. Throwing a proposal up on Github is unlikely to create a community and organization with the required commitments.

jlarocco 11y ago

For me personally, I'm already used to the ugly CL syntax that it's working around (hashes), already familiar and comfortable with the underlying libraries it's using (cl-ppcre, etc.), or don't find the features particularly useful (laziness, etc.). TBH, if I found those things annoying enough to seek out this library, I would probably just use Clojure or some other language.

ScottBurson 11y ago
That's the problem with any CL cleanup project: it's mostly going to appeal to newcomers to CL, who don't already have a large code base in the language, full of their own macros that address at least a few of the same issues. Not that CL couldn't use cleaning up. But to really make the new dialect popular, you'd have to focus on attracting new users, which would require things like writing books, or at least updating some of the existing books (e.g. Peter Seibel's). In short, defining and implementing the new dialect is only the first step of a long slog.
- OopsCriticality 11y ago
  Speaking of books, have you by chance read Weitz's new one? https://www.apress.com/9781484211779 https://www.apress.com/9781484211779
  - akkadmed 11y ago
    Worth it.
- dwc 11y ago
  > mostly going to appeal to newcomers to CL ... you'd have to focus on attracting new users It's my observation that CL regularly attracts new users, who grumble a bit at first and then fall in love. Then they drift away to other langs, keeping an affection for sexps, macros, and the numerous elegant aspects of CL. But drift away they do. IMO, if CL could keep more of the people who learn it well enough to love it, then it would be thriving. I have some opinions on why people drift away and how that could be addressed but they're not especially well formed at this time.
  - ScottBurson 11y ago
    > I have some opinions on why people drift away and how that could be addressed but they're not especially well formed at this time. I would like to hear them nonetheless.
    - dwc 11y ago
      I would rather not say until I've thought it out some more. A bag of mushy thoughts with a grain of truth in them would probably be provocative and wouldn't provide much utility for the CL community. Instead, here's one of the things that started me thinking about this... Some years back, Xach created the library manager Quicklisp, filling a huge hole in the lisp ecosystem. It's nice work and quickly became the defacto standard. Lots good to say about it and nothing bad, really. The thing that got me thinking was that this actually needed to be done at the time Xach did it. CL had been around a long time officially and even longer unofficially, and this really important piece of infrastructure had not been done. How could that be? "How could that be?" leads to more questions, and possible answers, and some loose ideas about moving forward. That's where I'm at, and I don't want to say more until I have something concrete and constructive. I wouldn't mind having a speculative conversation (that would help me greatly), but I think throwing out half baked ideas would do nothing more than the existing corpus of "why lisp isn't successful" blog posts, so I don't want to have that conversation somewhere like HN.
  - mvc 11y ago
    This is pretty close to my story. Had a lot of fun programming CL. Even worked with "His Kennyness" and Hans Huebner for a while. But I was young and needed to experience different dev cultures so I went and did some Rails for a while. I dream of meeting someone who wants to build something like mesos on top of cells.