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I know this is a demonstration project, but in general I wish people would stop building new Lisps and just use one of the existing ones. Common Lisp, Racket,
by jlarocco 10y ago
I know this is a demonstration project, but in general I wish people would stop building new Lisps and just use one of the existing ones.
Common Lisp, Racket, Clojure, Scheme, etc. are all great choices with decent compilers, interpreters, library ecosystems, editor support, etc.
Seems there's a new pet project Lisp released once a month or so, and none of them add anything interesting over the existing options.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoI think that the point of building a Lisp is the process of building Lisp, not to produce a better Lisp (or even one that is just as good).
- cardiffspaceman 10y agoIndeed. I built a Lisp in bash. I used a different approach to reading and consing than the FA uses. Basically what I wrote uses the idea from the IOCCC '89 "xlisp" which is that the s-expression is represented by a string instead of by a graph of cons cells. That means that the car operation must only be done on parenthesized strings. One obtains the car by searching for the first atom after the left paren. Similarly the cdr is the rest of the atoms within the parentheses. I didn't consider other encodings of s-expressions. Of course if you have computing to do in a bash script, bash already supports that so there is no real point. A colleague implemented a BASIC inside TECO which may have also been pointless.
- jlarocco 10y agoI was talking specifically about the projects that get posted on HN acting as if they're the next big thing in the Lisp world. They inevitably go nowhere and make little impact. Building a Lisp is a great exercise, but I don't need to know every time somebody does it. We might as well have posts about everybody's fizzbuzz...
- stcredzero 10y agowwww.everybodysfizzbuzz.com?