6 ms·

Common Lisp implementations already come with heaps of libraries: just grab a commercial one. Do you think programming languages _must_ be free? You lack a bu

by lelele 16y ago

Common Lisp implementations already come with heaps of libraries: just grab a commercial one. Do you think programming languages _must_ be free? You lack a business mindset, I think. Commercial programmers are willing to pay for languages which make their jobs easier. People have always be willing to pay for CL. Would have they be willing to pay for Ruby or Python when such languages came out? I don't think so. EDIT: Free implementations thrive and grow because they are free (as in free beer) even when they start - or are - lesser. That does not mean not having a bells and whistles free implementation is a measure of a language's worthyness.

viraptor 16y ago
Voted down, since this is both wrong and flamebait-ish IMO. Ruby / Python people willing to pay for a good environment? Have a look at http://www.activestate.com/activepython http://www.activestate.com/activepython or other activestate software. It's not a separate language as such, but they do create enough of their own environment setup in just the right way, to consider them comparable. Noone said that languages must be free. Then again - it makes the development so much easier, since it enables communities that know the technology rather than a specific product and are not lost when they don't have access to their one true compiler/ide/whatever. Times of paying for your compiler are long gone. Most of the really creative compiler improvements lately came from OSS anyways. Actually - can you think of any closed-source general programming compilers that matter? Apple likes Clang, but it's still OS. ICC is not useful unless you only want to support intel chips. I'm aware of specialised compilers - yeah - most of the VHDL and similar are proprietary and commercial. But as soon as you need special hardware, your random audience goes down to ~0 pretty quickly, so there's no point in having the language free.
- lelele 16y ago
  Not being a native speaker and thus maybe sounding harsh is not flamebaiting. > Ruby / Python people willing to pay for a good environment? I didn't say Ruby and Python aren't worthy languages _now_. I've said they were when they started. Yes, now that they have gained a big community, they enjoy lots of support from companies as well. > Noone said that languages must be free. This is implied whenever people say that CL has poor libraries because _free_ CL implementations have poor libraries, whenever developers weren't interested in some areas (web development, for instance). OTOH, how do Ruby and Python stack against CL when in comes to AI libraries? I hope we agree that free CL implementations in themselves are very good quality, anyway; even more so if you consider how little their community is compared to mainstream languages. > Actually - can you think of any closed-source general programming compilers that matter? MS Visual C++ coming to mind? However, that's not the issue. I was arguing that CLers willing to pay for their environments when they could just grab another free language should tell us something. Peace.
  - gaius 16y ago
    Worth nothing that even MS gives away its compilers these days. You pay for the layered products.
  - jedbrown 16y ago
    Show me any CL library that is competitive with numpy+scipy. Similarly, I do a lot of distributed memory work, for which MPI is necessary. For CL bindings, all I know of is CL-MPI and mpi4py trumps it in every way. I need parallel linear and nonlinear solvers, petsc4py fills that role well, but there is nothing similar for CL. It's also crucial that it work reliably in unconventional environments such as BlueGene, this is rare for proprietary implementations. I don't really like Python, but these libraries and it's portability make it a functional environment. I don't think any proprietary implementation is prepared to step in.
  - viraptor 16y ago
    Re. AI - I don't know - never needed to use them and pypi search is not very good for such expression :/ I suspect there is something though. Just as lisp was the king of NLP one day - right now I'd bet on NLTK any day. People learned to write parsers / tree processing and it's almost as trivial in Python as it is in lisps. Re. MSVCpp - Not only I got a free version from university (and another one from another university), there's a starter edition (not sure about the name - express?) which is free. Without context, it's hard to say why are they willing to pay. Maybe it's because they liked the environment? Maybe it's because their codebase is so big they can't switch anymore? Maybe because free alternatives suck at some level? Maybe the company pays and noone asks why? There are so many potential reasons, we'd need to analyse some stories of why are people doing this.
    - lelele 16y ago
      > Re. AI - I don't know - never needed to use them... Spot on! We think a language lacks libraries whenever we look at a language which has not been among the language of choice in our area of interest. > Re. MSVCpp - Not only I got a free version from university (and another one from another university), there's a starter edition (not sure about the name - express?) which is free. You surely are a young gun ^_^ MSVC++ has been a successful commercial product for a long time (and still is). I think MS made it free just because it started feeling the heat from GCC and didn't want to lose share. However, we were talking about open-source implementations, not free ones. > Without context, it's hard to say why are they willing to pay. If you were to hang on comp.lang.lisp for a while, you'd learn that CL do really prefer CL to any other language because of some features intrinsic to CL itself. Moreover, it looks like when they are freelancers, then they are making a good living, therefore having to shell out some cash for their own convenience; if they are employees, they are experienced enough to make the decision about what their company should buy. Why struggle to install a CL environment? Just shell out €1200 and you're up and running with Lispworks CL (among others).
edu 16y ago
Please, don't just down-vote if you don't agree with his comment.
zachbeane 16y ago
Whether or not there must be, many useful "free" libraries exist that provide more functionality than is built into any commercial CL implementations. At times they can be difficult to install. Quicklisp aims to make it less difficult, even if you paid money for your implementation.
jules 16y ago
I have been thinking about creating and selling a programming language + development environment, but I'm not sure if anyone is really willing to pay for such a thing. For a better IDE for an existing language yes, but for a new language? Any thoughts?
- lelele 16y ago
  What's your target market? If it is experienced developers, you'll have an hard time even for just the IDE.
  - jules 16y ago
    My target market is intelligent developers who want to get a desktop or web application done as quickly as possible, somebody who gets a lot of value out of being more productive while not being limited by external factors. A YC founder rather than someone who combines snippets of PHP found on the web to make a site for a client. There are people paying for IDEs (e.g. IntelliJ IDEA & Resharper, Visual Studio), but this is an IDE for an already very widely used language backed by big companies. All of the attempts at developing a new language for a profit seem to have failed or at least not made it big (e.g. Lisp vendors, Dylan, Smalltalk vendors, Rebol) despite being better than the free alternatives in a lot of ways.
    - lelele 16y ago
      > A YC founder rather than someone who combines snippets of PHP found on the web to make a site for a client. You should consider your target audience carefully. For instance, a startup founder is very likely short of cash, so she will be more inclined to choose, if not a free implementation, a cheap one. Could that pay back your development efforts? Because your development efforts will be hefty. Remember that to be attractive to smart developers, your language will have to be better than the languages you have mentioned, and by a reasonable margin. Don't underestimate the difficulty of designing a good editor, either. I'm saying this because you have said "not made it big". If you are after just making a living doing what you like, maybe the success of Clojure in that regard can be encouraging. Have you considered tapping the non-technical audience? Maybe many non-technical users would be delighted to be able to customize their environment. If you are looking for a challenging intellectual task, don't underestimate the difficulty of designing simple tools. I'd like to provide more creative suggestions, but that's all I can say. EDIT: You know, we developers tend to think about other developers, and we forgot how our knowledge could be beneficial to "outsiders".
gaius 16y ago
It is a bit chicken-and-egg; the only way a curious programmer would get to see a full-blown commercial Lisp is if they were already working somewhere that had bought it, and if they were they would probably already be a Lisper. Admittedly I haven't researched this in depth, but I don't think any of them do a "free for non-commercial use" edition without severe restrictions. Even Oracle, one of the most ruthlessly commercial companies in the software business, lets you download for free to kick the tyres...
lelele 16y ago
I love how controversial this post of mine seems (up-votes battling down-votes). No, flamebaiting was not my goal, but being controversial is a sign that I've hit an aching spot, I think. Thanks to everyone ^_^ EDIT: It would be nice if HN showed both up-votes and down-votes, instead of just their sum.
EdiX 16y ago
> Do you think programming languages _must_ be free yes

by lelele 16y ago

viraptor 16y ago

Voted down, since this is both wrong and flamebait-ish IMO. Ruby / Python people willing to pay for a good environment? Have a look at http://www.activestate.com/activepython http://www.activestate.com/activepython or other activestate software. It's not a separate language as such, but they do create enough of their own environment setup in just the right way, to consider them comparable. Noone said that languages must be free. Then again - it makes the development so much easier, since it enables communities that know the technology rather than a specific product and are not lost when they don't have access to their one true compiler/ide/whatever. Times of paying for your compiler are long gone. Most of the really creative compiler improvements lately came from OSS anyways. Actually - can you think of any closed-source general programming compilers that matter? Apple likes Clang, but it's still OS. ICC is not useful unless you only want to support intel chips. I'm aware of specialised compilers - yeah - most of the VHDL and similar are proprietary and commercial. But as soon as you need special hardware, your random audience goes down to ~0 pretty quickly, so there's no point in having the language free.

lelele 16y ago
Not being a native speaker and thus maybe sounding harsh is not flamebaiting. > Ruby / Python people willing to pay for a good environment? I didn't say Ruby and Python aren't worthy languages _now_. I've said they were when they started. Yes, now that they have gained a big community, they enjoy lots of support from companies as well. > Noone said that languages must be free. This is implied whenever people say that CL has poor libraries because _free_ CL implementations have poor libraries, whenever developers weren't interested in some areas (web development, for instance). OTOH, how do Ruby and Python stack against CL when in comes to AI libraries? I hope we agree that free CL implementations in themselves are very good quality, anyway; even more so if you consider how little their community is compared to mainstream languages. > Actually - can you think of any closed-source general programming compilers that matter? MS Visual C++ coming to mind? However, that's not the issue. I was arguing that CLers willing to pay for their environments when they could just grab another free language should tell us something. Peace.
- gaius 16y ago
  Worth nothing that even MS gives away its compilers these days. You pay for the layered products.
- jedbrown 16y ago
  Show me any CL library that is competitive with numpy+scipy. Similarly, I do a lot of distributed memory work, for which MPI is necessary. For CL bindings, all I know of is CL-MPI and mpi4py trumps it in every way. I need parallel linear and nonlinear solvers, petsc4py fills that role well, but there is nothing similar for CL. It's also crucial that it work reliably in unconventional environments such as BlueGene, this is rare for proprietary implementations. I don't really like Python, but these libraries and it's portability make it a functional environment. I don't think any proprietary implementation is prepared to step in.
- viraptor 16y ago
  Re. AI - I don't know - never needed to use them and pypi search is not very good for such expression :/ I suspect there is something though. Just as lisp was the king of NLP one day - right now I'd bet on NLTK any day. People learned to write parsers / tree processing and it's almost as trivial in Python as it is in lisps. Re. MSVCpp - Not only I got a free version from university (and another one from another university), there's a starter edition (not sure about the name - express?) which is free. Without context, it's hard to say why are they willing to pay. Maybe it's because they liked the environment? Maybe it's because their codebase is so big they can't switch anymore? Maybe because free alternatives suck at some level? Maybe the company pays and noone asks why? There are so many potential reasons, we'd need to analyse some stories of why are people doing this.
  - lelele 16y ago
    > Re. AI - I don't know - never needed to use them... Spot on! We think a language lacks libraries whenever we look at a language which has not been among the language of choice in our area of interest. > Re. MSVCpp - Not only I got a free version from university (and another one from another university), there's a starter edition (not sure about the name - express?) which is free. You surely are a young gun ^_^ MSVC++ has been a successful commercial product for a long time (and still is). I think MS made it free just because it started feeling the heat from GCC and didn't want to lose share. However, we were talking about open-source implementations, not free ones. > Without context, it's hard to say why are they willing to pay. If you were to hang on comp.lang.lisp for a while, you'd learn that CL do really prefer CL to any other language because of some features intrinsic to CL itself. Moreover, it looks like when they are freelancers, then they are making a good living, therefore having to shell out some cash for their own convenience; if they are employees, they are experienced enough to make the decision about what their company should buy. Why struggle to install a CL environment? Just shell out €1200 and you're up and running with Lispworks CL (among others).

edu 16y ago

Please, don't just down-vote if you don't agree with his comment.

zachbeane 16y ago

Whether or not there must be, many useful "free" libraries exist that provide more functionality than is built into any commercial CL implementations. At times they can be difficult to install. Quicklisp aims to make it less difficult, even if you paid money for your implementation.

jules 16y ago

I have been thinking about creating and selling a programming language + development environment, but I'm not sure if anyone is really willing to pay for such a thing. For a better IDE for an existing language yes, but for a new language? Any thoughts?

lelele 16y ago
What's your target market? If it is experienced developers, you'll have an hard time even for just the IDE.
- jules 16y ago
  My target market is intelligent developers who want to get a desktop or web application done as quickly as possible, somebody who gets a lot of value out of being more productive while not being limited by external factors. A YC founder rather than someone who combines snippets of PHP found on the web to make a site for a client. There are people paying for IDEs (e.g. IntelliJ IDEA & Resharper, Visual Studio), but this is an IDE for an already very widely used language backed by big companies. All of the attempts at developing a new language for a profit seem to have failed or at least not made it big (e.g. Lisp vendors, Dylan, Smalltalk vendors, Rebol) despite being better than the free alternatives in a lot of ways.
  - lelele 16y ago
    > A YC founder rather than someone who combines snippets of PHP found on the web to make a site for a client. You should consider your target audience carefully. For instance, a startup founder is very likely short of cash, so she will be more inclined to choose, if not a free implementation, a cheap one. Could that pay back your development efforts? Because your development efforts will be hefty. Remember that to be attractive to smart developers, your language will have to be better than the languages you have mentioned, and by a reasonable margin. Don't underestimate the difficulty of designing a good editor, either. I'm saying this because you have said "not made it big". If you are after just making a living doing what you like, maybe the success of Clojure in that regard can be encouraging. Have you considered tapping the non-technical audience? Maybe many non-technical users would be delighted to be able to customize their environment. If you are looking for a challenging intellectual task, don't underestimate the difficulty of designing simple tools. I'd like to provide more creative suggestions, but that's all I can say. EDIT: You know, we developers tend to think about other developers, and we forgot how our knowledge could be beneficial to "outsiders".

gaius 16y ago

It is a bit chicken-and-egg; the only way a curious programmer would get to see a full-blown commercial Lisp is if they were already working somewhere that had bought it, and if they were they would probably already be a Lisper. Admittedly I haven't researched this in depth, but I don't think any of them do a "free for non-commercial use" edition without severe restrictions. Even Oracle, one of the most ruthlessly commercial companies in the software business, lets you download for free to kick the tyres...

lelele 16y ago

I love how controversial this post of mine seems (up-votes battling down-votes). No, flamebaiting was not my goal, but being controversial is a sign that I've hit an aching spot, I think. Thanks to everyone ^_^ EDIT: It would be nice if HN showed both up-votes and down-votes, instead of just their sum.

EdiX 16y ago

> Do you think programming languages _must_ be free yes