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I do mean Common Lisp. I think that it'd be preferable for Guix to use it because Lisp is more production-ready than Scheme: it standardises things that Scheme

I do mean Common Lisp. I think that it'd be preferable for Guix to use it because Lisp is more production-ready than Scheme: it standardises things that Scheme — even R7R2 large — doesn't; it's a pragmatic production language into which a lot of experience went. And of course there's CLOS, which is absolutely awesome. Even better, a well-written Guix-Lisp would be portable between multiple Common Lisp implementations; it's extraordinarily difficult to write a real system in Scheme, precisely because Scheme is so under-specified: really, Guix isn't written in Scheme; it's written in Guile Scheme. Scheme is neat, and pretty, and very elegant, but it's not (even in its largest, most recent version) really meant for serious use on large systems. And I don't agree that it's a Lisp: it has only a single namespace, it breaks (car nil) → nil and (if nil "true" "false") → "false". I'm aware that rms dislikes Lisp and wants Scheme to be GNU's extension language; IMHO he's wrong, and his attitude has really held back GNU, Emacs and the Lisp world at large. Had it not been for that attitude, we might have a Common Lisp Emacs by now, we might have a Common Lisp GNU userland by now, we might have a GNU which really is Not Unix, instead of a mess of C, security bugs & hacks.

kazinator 8y ago
Note that MacCarthy's Lisp didn't have (car nil); it was an error. I'm reluctant to insist that a language in the Lisp family must have (car nil), since that means that Lisp 1 and Lisp 1.5 aren't Lisp! See this text in Steele and Gabriel's The Evolution of Lisp: In the end only a trivial exchange of features resulted from "the great MacLisp/Interlisp summit": MacLisp adopted from Interlisp the behavior (CAR NIL) -> NIL and (CDR NIL) -> NIL, and Interlisp adopted the concept of a read table. However, whether or not (car nil) works, it should express "the first element of the empty list, which is also false", rather than "the first element of a symbol that isn't related to lists and isn't Boolean false".

kazinator 8y ago

Note that MacCarthy's Lisp didn't have (car nil); it was an error. I'm reluctant to insist that a language in the Lisp family must have (car nil), since that means that Lisp 1 and Lisp 1.5 aren't Lisp! See this text in Steele and Gabriel's The Evolution of Lisp: In the end only a trivial exchange of features resulted from "the great MacLisp/Interlisp summit": MacLisp adopted from Interlisp the behavior (CAR NIL) -> NIL and (CDR NIL) -> NIL, and Interlisp adopted the concept of a read table. However, whether or not (car nil) works, it should express "the first element of the empty list, which is also false", rather than "the first element of a symbol that isn't related to lists and isn't Boolean false".