8 ms·

New Common Lisp website

137 points by ejbs2 10y ago

protomyth 10y ago
Click specification: "We're currently working on parsing the TeX sources of the specification to generate a more modern version of the CLHS. This might take a while." Yeah, that's probably not the message you want to send after all the virtues (e.g. speed) listed on the first page.
- somethingsimple 10y ago
  Why? They're just being honest about it. It's a large spec and it surely isn't that easy to convert it to a more modern format.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Put up a pdf (if you have TeX you can get a pdf), but don't make some technical argument that makes you sound slow. This is marketing not a technical talk.
    - kiiski 10y ago
      The CLHS[1] they mentioned has been available online for ages. What they're talking about is making a more modern site. Generating a PDF from the spec wouldn't get them any closer to that goal. [1]: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index...
      - protomyth 10y ago
        Then don't put a specification link on the home page and wait until it is done. The text is non-helpful to marketing the language particularly when books are actually available and linkable that can be read now.
    - blue1 10y ago
      IIRC the legal situation of the hyperspec is a bit weird and converting to other formats could be problematic. (Perhaps someone else may be more precise)
      - eudox 10y ago
        The HyperSpec is under LispWorks' copyright. The official ANSI document is copyrighted. The TeX sources of the spec, however, are fair game.
- eudox 10y ago
  It's a giant collection of TeX files from 1994. It's not easily converted into a proper, parseable format.
- fao_ 10y ago
  It's an extremely large language, with most of the things that are normally availible as libraries, defined as part of the language itself. So of course the conversion is going to take a while, especially if the input data isn't very well formatted. I don't really see how difficulty porting document sets to a nicer format translates into "This language isn't/doesn't foo", since that's more human error than the fault of the language itself.
fadelakin 10y ago
Can someone explain to me the main differences between a language like Common Lisp and Haskell? I'm planning on learning on a purely functional language this year and I've narrowed it down to Haskell and CL but I don't know which to pick. Haskell has sort of been winning due to my friends knowing it and using it. If you have any resources as well, please let me know. I don't know if this is the right place to post this.
- gaius 10y ago
  Go with your friends. That will make 100x the difference that any technical difference does. Same with any language really.
- nabla9 10y ago
  CL is not purely functional language. CL is either multi-paradigm language or Lisp paradigm language. There is lisp style programming. It has many functional primitives but typical CL programmer is not programming functionally. Other languages like Scheme or Clojure are more functionally 'oriented' Lisps.
  - fadelakin 10y ago
    Ah I see. I guess I got confused somewhere. Thanks for the clarification.
- cosarara97 10y ago
  You can write purely functional programs in CL, but it's not a purely functional language in the way haskell is, and I think most people don't use it that way.
- gkya 10y ago
  Common Lisp is not a purely functional language. The most caracteristic feature of Lisp in general is that, its whole syntax is the literal representation of one of it's core datatypes, the linked list. This allows for creating idioms of arbitrary complexity and reusable abstractions with ease, one a tiny kernel. Another wording of this is that the Lisp family of languages represent their programs as data that those programs directly manipulate, and thus, programs can manipulate themselves. This is homoiconicity. For who likes laconicisms, Lisp is a pleasant way to write and execute a parse tree. The advantage to this is that you can create syntactic abstractions that fit in nicely, that work on structured data instead of strings not parsed and verified yet (hey CPP!) and are reusable by other abstractions. The disadvantage is that your set of abstractions can become very easily dialects, and the language ecosystem is prone to (and damned by) fragmentation (i.e. every Scheme has it's own module system, and then there's a late standard that nobody uses). Another advantage of Lisp, though not unique to it neither theoretically nor practically, is the image, that is, the state of the interpreter. Your average Lisp process is code running on a Lisp VM, and the VM allows you to modify the running code. This allows you to pause the thread when an exception happens, modify the code, and play it again, and the program uses the new, modified version of the code. These are called restarts and supported at least in Steel Bank Common Lisp, and are well integrated into SLIME, the canonical Emacs mode for Common Lisp and other uncommon (!) lisps. This is so powerfull, I read that in one space mission, when they spotted a bug in the code of a research apparatus already in space, they connected to its image and hotpatched the code fixing the bug, saving NASA millions of dollars.
gaius 10y ago
Here is PG's note on ITA software from 2001 http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html It's all good stuff but I would wonder about any language community that hadn't gotten any other big hitters onboard in the last 15 years.
- eudox 10y ago
  Grammarly is pretty recent: http://tech.grammarly.com/blog/posts/Running-Lisp-in-Production.html http://tech.grammarly.com/blog/posts/Running-Lisp-in-Product...
- danielam 10y ago
  I used to work at ITA. I seem to recall Carl admitting at one point that the choice of language had mostly to do with the fact that he and Jeremy were most familiar with Common Lisp, having used it while pursuing their doctoral degrees, and that he probably would have chosen Java in retrospect (this was in 2007). The actual code was not the clean functional code you might expect (and as the email above notes, much of it was also written in C++, half by line count IIRC). In fact, there was interest in parallelizing parts of QPX (the low airfare search engine in question) to speed up search, but it was not amenable to such changes without first having to untangle a bunch of single threaded side effecting code and without incurring penalties in performance or resource consumption.
BMarkmann 10y ago
I love common lisp. That being said, i feel like this effort might be better spent contributing to modernizing and cleaning up / updating the existing community sites like cliki.net.
- sedachv 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, what would you like to see updated on cliki.net? I wrote cliki2 with Andrey Moskvitin so a lot of the changes from the first cliki ended up being our opinions.
  - BMarkmann 10y ago
    I guess the point I was trying to make wasn't that cliki in particular has any shortcomings, but that more hands on any particular open source effort tend to yield more fruit that those hands spread across as many independent efforts. The CL community in general has some amazingly prolific contributors, though perhaps fewer in number than other languages enjoy. One thing I've always noticed, though, is that the resources out there lack the "glue" to tie everything together. Cliki is definitely one resource that does that, Quicklisp and its doc page (https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/UNOFFICIAL/docs/ https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/UNOFFICIAL/docs/) is another. Here's something of a motivating example... I wanted to mess around with building a multi-threaded server the other day. I went to Cliki, found usocket and bordeaux-threads, from their descriptions it sounded like they would be a reasonable starting point to build on. The API documentation and tests in their repository for both projects left me scratching my head... Then I started searching for applications that used them and between Cliki and Googling didn't find many great examples. Then I said, well, let's step back and see how Hunchentoot handles its networking layer. Turns out it uses -- wait for it -- usocket and bordeaux-threads. Maybe it would be helpful to link from the "recommended libraries" (and other topic pages) to projects that use each library? I don't really have any concrete advice, I just feel like one of the things the CL resources out there lack is some layer that ties everything together. Cliki is a great starting point, but it might benefit from more hands. That's certainly not (not by a long shot) the only place where the scattered CL resources out there could benefit from volunteers. There are untold numbers of things like (https://common-lisp.net/project/common-lisp-beginner/ https://common-lisp.net/project/common-lisp-beginner/) this floating around that more hands would help. Sometimes the answer isn't, hey, let me make my own site -- maybe step back and consider whether your efforts could benefit the community more if you lent your time to something that already exists. Just a thought.
dri_ft 10y ago
I hate the current trend for websites to have about a page's worth of information spread over about eight pages' worth of space. I'm used to seeing it on startup websites, where it doesn't bother me so much because I expect those to be trendy. But I'm recently seeing it infect websites of old school geek projects that I feel should know better. This is one example and the new emacs website a few days ago was another.
- xenophonf 10y ago
  I'll allow it. Lisp in general (and Common Lisp in particular) desperately needs better marketing, which unfortunately is susceptible to the vagaries of fashion. If dressing it up a little makes it more attractive to the next generation, then mission accomplished.
  - dri_ft 10y ago
    You're right. Perhaps I just feel a little sad that it's necessary, though.
  - janoc 10y ago
    Sorry, but a "website" which is basically a set of powerpoint slides in Javascript is certainly not going to help "market" anything. And to add insult to the injury, when you actually suffer through those empty marketing slogans, you get down to a big link "Start here" - which unveils a link to few very basic tutorials. What exactly is the point of such "website"? The information value of this is zero. What a waste of time. A much better (but not the latest web framework buzzword compliant) resource is this: http://www.lisperati.com/ http://www.lisperati.com/
    - cname 10y ago
      You may have found it to be a waste of time, but I thought it was a pretty good introduction. Probably the furthest I've gotten into Common Lisp over the past ten years or so.
  - jkrems 10y ago
gkya 10y ago
Discussion on /r/lisp, yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/4j6v8y/lisplangorg_a_promotional_common_lisp_website/ https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/4j6v8y/lisplangorg_a_...
- dwc 10y ago
  (Lack of) discussion here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11691086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11691086
_asummers 10y ago
Not sure if bug, but the right curly double quotes in the CL snippets bother me way more than they probably should. In the source, it's simply a " character, so the CSS is likely conflicting somewhere.
golergka 10y ago
Learning Scheme with SICP right now, and there's a question I'm now pondering: how does one choose between Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket, Clojure and others? Is there a good comparison of Lisp-derived languages somewhere?
- Decade 10y ago
  There are many comparisons online, but opinions are cheap, so I will offer mine. For SICP, stick to Scheme. The ideas are valuable in themselves, and IME it’s easier to learn the author’s obscure language than to translate to another language. When you’re struggling to learn something, I prefer not to waste time figuring out whether it’s not working because it wasn’t translated properly or because I made a mistake in the procedure. Especially when SICP uses Scheme’s tail call optimization, which few other Lisps have. Racket is one of the few. Other than that, it’s just a matter of personal taste and practical considerations. I especially like how Clojure and ClojureScript run well on dominant legacy platforms, the JVM and the browser, but you could choose otherwise.
- Flow 10y ago
  Stick with Scheme for SICP. As for the other Lisps, I think you should give them all a lengthy and serious try. It's worth it. For Common Lisp, when you have learnt it a bit, get the book Let over Lambda. It's a great bus-ride read and, IMHO, is one of the best Lisp books I've read. When you get to Clojure, don't be put off by the JVM and the harsh stack traces and unhelpful error messages. Look at the Rich Hickey video presentations and realize Clojure is its own thing. There are lots of smart and practical choices made in Clojure. I've not had time to give Racket a try yet. But it seems a very nice language with good implementation, docs and community.
Decade 10y ago
I love (sarcastically) how the Start here -> First Steps does not include any instructions on how to get a Common Lisp installed and running on your computer.
- eudox 10y ago
  http://lisp-lang.org/learn/getting-started/ http://lisp-lang.org/learn/getting-started/ The link is above the 'Tutorials' heading. Maybe it needs some custom style to make it stand out.
  - aidenn0 10y ago
    I did a double-take on that as well, so it might.
  - Decade 10y ago
    Maybe also include a backwards link from First Steps to Getting Started, and not just a forward link to Functions.
Slippery_John 10y ago
I find it amusing that their picture for stability is a mountain right next to a supervolcano.
Learn2win 10y ago
I use (typed) Racket and it's wonderful.

137 points by ejbs2 10y ago

Click specification: "We're currently working on parsing the TeX sources of the specification to generate a more modern version of the CLHS. This might take a while." Yeah, that's probably not the message you want to send after all the virtues (e.g. speed) listed on the first page.

somethingsimple 10y ago
Why? They're just being honest about it. It's a large spec and it surely isn't that easy to convert it to a more modern format.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Put up a pdf (if you have TeX you can get a pdf), but don't make some technical argument that makes you sound slow. This is marketing not a technical talk.
  - kiiski 10y ago
    The CLHS[1] they mentioned has been available online for ages. What they're talking about is making a more modern site. Generating a PDF from the spec wouldn't get them any closer to that goal. [1]: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index...
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Then don't put a specification link on the home page and wait until it is done. The text is non-helpful to marketing the language particularly when books are actually available and linkable that can be read now.
  - blue1 10y ago
    IIRC the legal situation of the hyperspec is a bit weird and converting to other formats could be problematic. (Perhaps someone else may be more precise)
    - eudox 10y ago
      The HyperSpec is under LispWorks' copyright. The official ANSI document is copyrighted. The TeX sources of the spec, however, are fair game.
eudox 10y ago
It's a giant collection of TeX files from 1994. It's not easily converted into a proper, parseable format.
fao_ 10y ago
It's an extremely large language, with most of the things that are normally availible as libraries, defined as part of the language itself. So of course the conversion is going to take a while, especially if the input data isn't very well formatted. I don't really see how difficulty porting document sets to a nicer format translates into "This language isn't/doesn't foo", since that's more human error than the fault of the language itself.

fadelakin 10y ago

Can someone explain to me the main differences between a language like Common Lisp and Haskell? I'm planning on learning on a purely functional language this year and I've narrowed it down to Haskell and CL but I don't know which to pick. Haskell has sort of been winning due to my friends knowing it and using it. If you have any resources as well, please let me know. I don't know if this is the right place to post this.

gaius 10y ago
Go with your friends. That will make 100x the difference that any technical difference does. Same with any language really.
nabla9 10y ago
CL is not purely functional language. CL is either multi-paradigm language or Lisp paradigm language. There is lisp style programming. It has many functional primitives but typical CL programmer is not programming functionally. Other languages like Scheme or Clojure are more functionally 'oriented' Lisps.
- fadelakin 10y ago
  Ah I see. I guess I got confused somewhere. Thanks for the clarification.
cosarara97 10y ago
You can write purely functional programs in CL, but it's not a purely functional language in the way haskell is, and I think most people don't use it that way.
gkya 10y ago
Common Lisp is not a purely functional language. The most caracteristic feature of Lisp in general is that, its whole syntax is the literal representation of one of it's core datatypes, the linked list. This allows for creating idioms of arbitrary complexity and reusable abstractions with ease, one a tiny kernel. Another wording of this is that the Lisp family of languages represent their programs as data that those programs directly manipulate, and thus, programs can manipulate themselves. This is homoiconicity. For who likes laconicisms, Lisp is a pleasant way to write and execute a parse tree. The advantage to this is that you can create syntactic abstractions that fit in nicely, that work on structured data instead of strings not parsed and verified yet (hey CPP!) and are reusable by other abstractions. The disadvantage is that your set of abstractions can become very easily dialects, and the language ecosystem is prone to (and damned by) fragmentation (i.e. every Scheme has it's own module system, and then there's a late standard that nobody uses). Another advantage of Lisp, though not unique to it neither theoretically nor practically, is the image, that is, the state of the interpreter. Your average Lisp process is code running on a Lisp VM, and the VM allows you to modify the running code. This allows you to pause the thread when an exception happens, modify the code, and play it again, and the program uses the new, modified version of the code. These are called restarts and supported at least in Steel Bank Common Lisp, and are well integrated into SLIME, the canonical Emacs mode for Common Lisp and other uncommon (!) lisps. This is so powerfull, I read that in one space mission, when they spotted a bug in the code of a research apparatus already in space, they connected to its image and hotpatched the code fixing the bug, saving NASA millions of dollars.

gaius 10y ago

Here is PG's note on ITA software from 2001 http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html It's all good stuff but I would wonder about any language community that hadn't gotten any other big hitters onboard in the last 15 years.

eudox 10y ago
Grammarly is pretty recent: http://tech.grammarly.com/blog/posts/Running-Lisp-in-Production.html http://tech.grammarly.com/blog/posts/Running-Lisp-in-Product...
danielam 10y ago
I used to work at ITA. I seem to recall Carl admitting at one point that the choice of language had mostly to do with the fact that he and Jeremy were most familiar with Common Lisp, having used it while pursuing their doctoral degrees, and that he probably would have chosen Java in retrospect (this was in 2007). The actual code was not the clean functional code you might expect (and as the email above notes, much of it was also written in C++, half by line count IIRC). In fact, there was interest in parallelizing parts of QPX (the low airfare search engine in question) to speed up search, but it was not amenable to such changes without first having to untangle a bunch of single threaded side effecting code and without incurring penalties in performance or resource consumption.

BMarkmann 10y ago

I love common lisp. That being said, i feel like this effort might be better spent contributing to modernizing and cleaning up / updating the existing community sites like cliki.net.

sedachv 10y ago
Out of curiosity, what would you like to see updated on cliki.net? I wrote cliki2 with Andrey Moskvitin so a lot of the changes from the first cliki ended up being our opinions.
- BMarkmann 10y ago
  I guess the point I was trying to make wasn't that cliki in particular has any shortcomings, but that more hands on any particular open source effort tend to yield more fruit that those hands spread across as many independent efforts. The CL community in general has some amazingly prolific contributors, though perhaps fewer in number than other languages enjoy. One thing I've always noticed, though, is that the resources out there lack the "glue" to tie everything together. Cliki is definitely one resource that does that, Quicklisp and its doc page (https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/UNOFFICIAL/docs/ https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/UNOFFICIAL/docs/) is another. Here's something of a motivating example... I wanted to mess around with building a multi-threaded server the other day. I went to Cliki, found usocket and bordeaux-threads, from their descriptions it sounded like they would be a reasonable starting point to build on. The API documentation and tests in their repository for both projects left me scratching my head... Then I started searching for applications that used them and between Cliki and Googling didn't find many great examples. Then I said, well, let's step back and see how Hunchentoot handles its networking layer. Turns out it uses -- wait for it -- usocket and bordeaux-threads. Maybe it would be helpful to link from the "recommended libraries" (and other topic pages) to projects that use each library? I don't really have any concrete advice, I just feel like one of the things the CL resources out there lack is some layer that ties everything together. Cliki is a great starting point, but it might benefit from more hands. That's certainly not (not by a long shot) the only place where the scattered CL resources out there could benefit from volunteers. There are untold numbers of things like (https://common-lisp.net/project/common-lisp-beginner/ https://common-lisp.net/project/common-lisp-beginner/) this floating around that more hands would help. Sometimes the answer isn't, hey, let me make my own site -- maybe step back and consider whether your efforts could benefit the community more if you lent your time to something that already exists. Just a thought.

dri_ft 10y ago

I hate the current trend for websites to have about a page's worth of information spread over about eight pages' worth of space. I'm used to seeing it on startup websites, where it doesn't bother me so much because I expect those to be trendy. But I'm recently seeing it infect websites of old school geek projects that I feel should know better. This is one example and the new emacs website a few days ago was another.

xenophonf 10y ago
I'll allow it. Lisp in general (and Common Lisp in particular) desperately needs better marketing, which unfortunately is susceptible to the vagaries of fashion. If dressing it up a little makes it more attractive to the next generation, then mission accomplished.
- dri_ft 10y ago
  You're right. Perhaps I just feel a little sad that it's necessary, though.
- janoc 10y ago
  Sorry, but a "website" which is basically a set of powerpoint slides in Javascript is certainly not going to help "market" anything. And to add insult to the injury, when you actually suffer through those empty marketing slogans, you get down to a big link "Start here" - which unveils a link to few very basic tutorials. What exactly is the point of such "website"? The information value of this is zero. What a waste of time. A much better (but not the latest web framework buzzword compliant) resource is this: http://www.lisperati.com/ http://www.lisperati.com/
  - cname 10y ago
    You may have found it to be a waste of time, but I thought it was a pretty good introduction. Probably the furthest I've gotten into Common Lisp over the past ten years or so.
- jkrems 10y ago

gkya 10y ago

Discussion on /r/lisp, yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/4j6v8y/lisplangorg_a_promotional_common_lisp_website/ https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/4j6v8y/lisplangorg_a_...

dwc 10y ago
(Lack of) discussion here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11691086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11691086

_asummers 10y ago

Not sure if bug, but the right curly double quotes in the CL snippets bother me way more than they probably should. In the source, it's simply a " character, so the CSS is likely conflicting somewhere.

golergka 10y ago

Learning Scheme with SICP right now, and there's a question I'm now pondering: how does one choose between Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket, Clojure and others? Is there a good comparison of Lisp-derived languages somewhere?

Decade 10y ago
There are many comparisons online, but opinions are cheap, so I will offer mine. For SICP, stick to Scheme. The ideas are valuable in themselves, and IME it’s easier to learn the author’s obscure language than to translate to another language. When you’re struggling to learn something, I prefer not to waste time figuring out whether it’s not working because it wasn’t translated properly or because I made a mistake in the procedure. Especially when SICP uses Scheme’s tail call optimization, which few other Lisps have. Racket is one of the few. Other than that, it’s just a matter of personal taste and practical considerations. I especially like how Clojure and ClojureScript run well on dominant legacy platforms, the JVM and the browser, but you could choose otherwise.
Flow 10y ago
Stick with Scheme for SICP. As for the other Lisps, I think you should give them all a lengthy and serious try. It's worth it. For Common Lisp, when you have learnt it a bit, get the book Let over Lambda. It's a great bus-ride read and, IMHO, is one of the best Lisp books I've read. When you get to Clojure, don't be put off by the JVM and the harsh stack traces and unhelpful error messages. Look at the Rich Hickey video presentations and realize Clojure is its own thing. There are lots of smart and practical choices made in Clojure. I've not had time to give Racket a try yet. But it seems a very nice language with good implementation, docs and community.

Decade 10y ago

I love (sarcastically) how the Start here -> First Steps does not include any instructions on how to get a Common Lisp installed and running on your computer.

eudox 10y ago
http://lisp-lang.org/learn/getting-started/ http://lisp-lang.org/learn/getting-started/ The link is above the 'Tutorials' heading. Maybe it needs some custom style to make it stand out.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  I did a double-take on that as well, so it might.
- Decade 10y ago
  Maybe also include a backwards link from First Steps to Getting Started, and not just a forward link to Functions.

Slippery_John 10y ago

I find it amusing that their picture for stability is a mountain right next to a supervolcano.

Learn2win 10y ago

I use (typed) Racket and it's wonderful.