7 ms·

A hundred Lisp startups would bloom. ITA is the blackhole of Lisp programmers; a good chunk of them work there.

by mahmud 17y ago

fbu 17y ago
For a new civilized startup age ? http://xkcd.com/297/ http://xkcd.com/297/
- mahmud 17y ago
  Idealized Lisp Syndrome is something the read-only "fans" suffer from. Real Lispers don't see the parens, but they also don't see what the fuss is all about .. I am a Lisper by day-job, and it too is capable of being a royal pain in the ass. Only difference is, instead of bitching about other people's code; in Lisp, I have to write the code then bitch about it :-/
hga 17y ago
It might be bad for Common Lisp; I can see a number of them switching to Clojure. In his talk last year (NOTE, seems to be gone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquJvmHF3S8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquJvmHF3S8) Dan Weinreb gave Common Lisp only about another 10 years and guessed that Clojure is the future of Lisp. Which is my guess as well: Common Lisp is stuck in standardization amber prior to it dealing with too many things that are critical today (concurrency and network programming being the two biggest ones), Scheme is in a mess due to the mess with R6RS and moves slowly. At least it moves, unlike CL, but it's so slow there isn't even yet a standard for multidimensional arrays; at this point I expect it to continue in its niches of education and language research for a long time.
- porlw 17y ago
  The main thing that attracts me to Clojure is the abundance of java libraries and standard APIs and corresponding documentation available. To do anything useful with common lisp I had to spend a lot of time researching which CL supported which APIs, and stuff like GUIs and SQL weren't standardised (or maybe they were, but finding implementations of the standards was difficult). Contrast this to my experience with Clojure, where I had a REPL running in a text widget within an hour of starting to play. Sure, most of the code isn't very Lisp-y ATM but then it's mostly direct library calls. As I learn more I expect I will start using macros for things like GUI building (or perhaps someone has already created a more natural clojure library for GUIs and I will use that) Being able to get started and productive immediately is a big win for Clojure (and other JVM based languages). Even if you don't know much Java, there are abundant tutorials and examples on pretty much any API that are relatively simple to translate from Java to Clojure.
  - hga 17y ago
    Yes, both of the other Lisp communities have done an awful job of the basic blocking and tackling that's needed in the foundation to do most of the interesting and useful work today. A big group like ITA's can get around that with no problem, but it's too much of a pain for most individuals.

A hundred Lisp startups would bloom. ITA is the blackhole of Lisp programmers; a good chunk of them work there.

by mahmud 17y ago

A hundred Lisp startups would bloom. ITA is the blackhole of Lisp programmers; a good chunk of them work there.

fbu 17y ago

For a new civilized startup age ? http://xkcd.com/297/ http://xkcd.com/297/

mahmud 17y ago
Idealized Lisp Syndrome is something the read-only "fans" suffer from. Real Lispers don't see the parens, but they also don't see what the fuss is all about .. I am a Lisper by day-job, and it too is capable of being a royal pain in the ass. Only difference is, instead of bitching about other people's code; in Lisp, I have to write the code then bitch about it :-/

hga 17y ago

It might be bad for Common Lisp; I can see a number of them switching to Clojure. In his talk last year (NOTE, seems to be gone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquJvmHF3S8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquJvmHF3S8) Dan Weinreb gave Common Lisp only about another 10 years and guessed that Clojure is the future of Lisp. Which is my guess as well: Common Lisp is stuck in standardization amber prior to it dealing with too many things that are critical today (concurrency and network programming being the two biggest ones), Scheme is in a mess due to the mess with R6RS and moves slowly. At least it moves, unlike CL, but it's so slow there isn't even yet a standard for multidimensional arrays; at this point I expect it to continue in its niches of education and language research for a long time.

porlw 17y ago
The main thing that attracts me to Clojure is the abundance of java libraries and standard APIs and corresponding documentation available. To do anything useful with common lisp I had to spend a lot of time researching which CL supported which APIs, and stuff like GUIs and SQL weren't standardised (or maybe they were, but finding implementations of the standards was difficult). Contrast this to my experience with Clojure, where I had a REPL running in a text widget within an hour of starting to play. Sure, most of the code isn't very Lisp-y ATM but then it's mostly direct library calls. As I learn more I expect I will start using macros for things like GUI building (or perhaps someone has already created a more natural clojure library for GUIs and I will use that) Being able to get started and productive immediately is a big win for Clojure (and other JVM based languages). Even if you don't know much Java, there are abundant tutorials and examples on pretty much any API that are relatively simple to translate from Java to Clojure.
- hga 17y ago
  Yes, both of the other Lisp communities have done an awful job of the basic blocking and tackling that's needed in the foundation to do most of the interesting and useful work today. A big group like ITA's can get around that with no problem, but it's too much of a pain for most individuals.