5 ms·

Lisp: No easy download

19 points by nickb 18y ago

anonym 18y ago
http://www.sbcl.org http://www.sbcl.org -> "Downloads" -> Linux/x86 (or your architecture/OS of choice). Hold on a second, I need to lie down for a moment after all that hard work there. OK. Yes, there's not one Lisp implementation that is canonical and called "Lisp" and which lives at lisp.com. Life is pain.
- reitzensteinm 18y ago
  Time to download SBCL from its website - 30 seconds. Not the problem. Time to acquire the domain knowledge by learning about the different implementations and their respective strengths and weaknesses and decide on one (which could get nasty if you pick the wrong choice) - minutes to hours. That is the problem.
- feijai 18y ago
  I actually recently had to install SBCL on my OS X 10.4 (Tiger) box. Here's how it went: 1. Grab from the Downloads folder. 2. Build. 3. Bombs during building because SBCL now relies on a link symbol which doesn't exist in Tiger. Apparently all Mac Lisp users are require to be 10.5 Leopard users. 4. Swear a bit. 5. Search the web. 6. Find lots of people swearing also, no answers. 7. Try CVS. 8. Build. 9. Bombs during build. 10. More swearing. 11. Start hunting through earlier versions of SBCL. 12. About 10 downloads later (and they take a lot of time each to download and build until it fails), finally find one which doesn't rely on the symbol. 13. Am now running SBCL. All told, about eight hours.
  - anonym 18y ago
    Why are you building, instead of downloading the binary?
brlewis 18y ago
Anonymous said it best: http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/node/29#comment-69 http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/node/29#comment-69
- aggieben 18y ago
  The comment was there is no canonical Lisp implementation like there is for Python and Ruby True. But still, try to find a link anywhere on lisp.org (let alone the front page) to any implementation of lisp. The shortest path I could find to downloading any kind of implementation was to click "ALU Wiki" -> Implementations -> wherever. That's at least 4 clicks to actually get Lisp and the first link takes you away from lisp.org. That's too many clicks, and too indirect (if you are a newbie looking to download Lisp, why would you click on a link with the text "ALU Wiki"?). The very first paragraph on lisp.org should be a terse explanation that there are many implementations of lisp, Common Lisp is the most widely used, and to get started, you probably want one of <list the 3 most popular ones here> with the text linked directly to the download page for that implementation. There's no reason that someone trying to get started should have to read "The Rich History of Lisp" or anything else so abstruse, or anything that has so little to do with programming Lisp (like most of the ALU stuff). Someone should convince the ALU that lisp.org should be for Lisp and that the first view links should not be: ALU History Board / Minutes Sponsors Membership Contact Us
  - jrockway 18y ago
    If people don't know about the different varieties of Lisp, what are they going to do once they download one? If you don't know what programming language you're trying to download, you probably don't know how to program in it.
    - aggieben 18y ago
      That's the whole point - they know they want "Lisp" because of something they heard someone say, or because of something they read. That's all they know. Expecting someone to understand the Lisp ecosystem before getting started is unreasonable. Lispbox would be a great way to get started, and you don't need to know anything about the different varieties of Lisp until you start trying to make something you'll redistribute (which isn't what newbies are doing at first anyway).
gaius 18y ago
Actually there is, it's just not where you expect it :-) http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/
- aggieben 18y ago
  Then maybe this should be the first of 3-4 links on lisp.org. A newbie is not likely to find this (I know I didn't know anything about Lispbox when I first started, although to be fair, I'm not sure it was out at the time).
jrockway 18y ago
perl.com is not the Perl home page.
daniel-cussen 18y ago
As someone who tried to go from noob to SICP, I can attest to this. I was really like looking forward to learning lisp after reading pg's essays, but when the time came to install the environment, I hit a brick wall. Pg does mention a noob should get a tech-savvy friend to help him get started. Unfortunately, all the hackers I knew were in the Bay Area, but I was in South America. Installing Lisp on a mac took me two months, working full time (between macports and other false starts, like trying to install linux). I still can't get slime on emacs; I have to run clisp in the terminal. So, yeah, not exactly user friendly, or accessible to beginners.
- gaius 18y ago
  See my link to Lispbox below.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
    - gaius 18y ago
      I have it working on my Mac (OS 10.4 then 10.5) no problems, which Lisp did you choose?
      - daniel-cussen 18y ago
        SBCL, mzScheme, and Clisp. I got SBCL and Clisp to work. I'm having trouble explaining why I had such a hard time, but I think that's because I was a noob at the outset, but I'm not such a noob any more. Sure, now I can install Lisp on a friends computer in a day, tops. For good hackers, installing lisp is trivial. Of course, there are lots of things that good hackers can do in a tiny fraction of the time it takes anyone else. But from a noob's perspective, everything is very different. There might be a place that works, but there are many that don't, and those dead ends are really going to set you back. Maybe I can't see things through a noob's eyes any more, but for whatever reasons, installing lisp took me two months, working full time.
tx 18y ago
Yeah, he should have added "Part-2: Downloading Libraries". They actually exist, and can rival comprehensive library of Python, but it takes quite a lot of energy to discover. I remember asking here on HN "what is CL standard library? where is it documented?" and people actually pointed to a magic place that I forgot to bookmark and now I'm lost again. :-) Ubuntu does a decent job of packaging some popular CL libs in their apt repos.
- pchristensen 18y ago
  CL Hyperspec: http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/index.html http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/index.html Download a copy from LispWorks: ftp://ftp.lispworks.com/pub/software_tools/reference/HyperSpec-7-0.tar.gz
schtog 18y ago
lispbox(common lisp) and drscheme(scheme ldo) are two good packages/environments but it isnt obvious how to find them. the value of a "click to download-click to install-write short piece of code and see result" -cycle hat can be done immediately is very high. feedback is obv very important for learning and LISP doesnt provide much of that in the beginning. with python you can create games and simple but useful programs right away. when arc is finished im all for helping to create a good IDE and libraries to it and document it well and create a very easy path for beginners to gte started. then maybe lisp can get popular. i think it will stay a small language though.
pchristensen 18y ago
It's still not a one-click, but I have written install guides thorough enough to work on the first try for CLisp and SBCL: http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-clisp-emacs-and-slime-on-windows-xp/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-clisp-e... http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-sbcl-emacs-and-slime-on-windows-xp/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-sbcl-em... It takes about 15 minutes and includes installing Emacs and SLIME, plus a super basic Emacs tutorial enough to open and save files.
dreish 18y ago
It was pretty easy for me, on my Fedora box: # yum -y install clisp

19 points by nickb 18y ago

http://www.sbcl.org http://www.sbcl.org -> "Downloads" -> Linux/x86 (or your architecture/OS of choice). Hold on a second, I need to lie down for a moment after all that hard work there. OK. Yes, there's not one Lisp implementation that is canonical and called "Lisp" and which lives at lisp.com. Life is pain.

reitzensteinm 18y ago
Time to download SBCL from its website - 30 seconds. Not the problem. Time to acquire the domain knowledge by learning about the different implementations and their respective strengths and weaknesses and decide on one (which could get nasty if you pick the wrong choice) - minutes to hours. That is the problem.
feijai 18y ago
I actually recently had to install SBCL on my OS X 10.4 (Tiger) box. Here's how it went: 1. Grab from the Downloads folder. 2. Build. 3. Bombs during building because SBCL now relies on a link symbol which doesn't exist in Tiger. Apparently all Mac Lisp users are require to be 10.5 Leopard users. 4. Swear a bit. 5. Search the web. 6. Find lots of people swearing also, no answers. 7. Try CVS. 8. Build. 9. Bombs during build. 10. More swearing. 11. Start hunting through earlier versions of SBCL. 12. About 10 downloads later (and they take a lot of time each to download and build until it fails), finally find one which doesn't rely on the symbol. 13. Am now running SBCL. All told, about eight hours.
- anonym 18y ago
  Why are you building, instead of downloading the binary?

brlewis 18y ago

Anonymous said it best: http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/node/29#comment-69 http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/node/29#comment-69

aggieben 18y ago
The comment was there is no canonical Lisp implementation like there is for Python and Ruby True. But still, try to find a link anywhere on lisp.org (let alone the front page) to any implementation of lisp. The shortest path I could find to downloading any kind of implementation was to click "ALU Wiki" -> Implementations -> wherever. That's at least 4 clicks to actually get Lisp and the first link takes you away from lisp.org. That's too many clicks, and too indirect (if you are a newbie looking to download Lisp, why would you click on a link with the text "ALU Wiki"?). The very first paragraph on lisp.org should be a terse explanation that there are many implementations of lisp, Common Lisp is the most widely used, and to get started, you probably want one of <list the 3 most popular ones here> with the text linked directly to the download page for that implementation. There's no reason that someone trying to get started should have to read "The Rich History of Lisp" or anything else so abstruse, or anything that has so little to do with programming Lisp (like most of the ALU stuff). Someone should convince the ALU that lisp.org should be for Lisp and that the first view links should not be: ALU History Board / Minutes Sponsors Membership Contact Us
- jrockway 18y ago
  If people don't know about the different varieties of Lisp, what are they going to do once they download one? If you don't know what programming language you're trying to download, you probably don't know how to program in it.
  - aggieben 18y ago
    That's the whole point - they know they want "Lisp" because of something they heard someone say, or because of something they read. That's all they know. Expecting someone to understand the Lisp ecosystem before getting started is unreasonable. Lispbox would be a great way to get started, and you don't need to know anything about the different varieties of Lisp until you start trying to make something you'll redistribute (which isn't what newbies are doing at first anyway).

gaius 18y ago

Actually there is, it's just not where you expect it :-) http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/

aggieben 18y ago
Then maybe this should be the first of 3-4 links on lisp.org. A newbie is not likely to find this (I know I didn't know anything about Lispbox when I first started, although to be fair, I'm not sure it was out at the time).

jrockway 18y ago

perl.com is not the Perl home page.

daniel-cussen 18y ago

As someone who tried to go from noob to SICP, I can attest to this. I was really like looking forward to learning lisp after reading pg's essays, but when the time came to install the environment, I hit a brick wall. Pg does mention a noob should get a tech-savvy friend to help him get started. Unfortunately, all the hackers I knew were in the Bay Area, but I was in South America. Installing Lisp on a mac took me two months, working full time (between macports and other false starts, like trying to install linux). I still can't get slime on emacs; I have to run clisp in the terminal. So, yeah, not exactly user friendly, or accessible to beginners.

gaius 18y ago
See my link to Lispbox below.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
  - gaius 18y ago
    I have it working on my Mac (OS 10.4 then 10.5) no problems, which Lisp did you choose?
    - daniel-cussen 18y ago
      SBCL, mzScheme, and Clisp. I got SBCL and Clisp to work. I'm having trouble explaining why I had such a hard time, but I think that's because I was a noob at the outset, but I'm not such a noob any more. Sure, now I can install Lisp on a friends computer in a day, tops. For good hackers, installing lisp is trivial. Of course, there are lots of things that good hackers can do in a tiny fraction of the time it takes anyone else. But from a noob's perspective, everything is very different. There might be a place that works, but there are many that don't, and those dead ends are really going to set you back. Maybe I can't see things through a noob's eyes any more, but for whatever reasons, installing lisp took me two months, working full time.

tx 18y ago

Yeah, he should have added "Part-2: Downloading Libraries". They actually exist, and can rival comprehensive library of Python, but it takes quite a lot of energy to discover. I remember asking here on HN "what is CL standard library? where is it documented?" and people actually pointed to a magic place that I forgot to bookmark and now I'm lost again. :-) Ubuntu does a decent job of packaging some popular CL libs in their apt repos.

pchristensen 18y ago
CL Hyperspec: http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/index.html http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/index.html Download a copy from LispWorks: ftp://ftp.lispworks.com/pub/software_tools/reference/HyperSpec-7-0.tar.gz

schtog 18y ago

lispbox(common lisp) and drscheme(scheme ldo) are two good packages/environments but it isnt obvious how to find them. the value of a "click to download-click to install-write short piece of code and see result" -cycle hat can be done immediately is very high. feedback is obv very important for learning and LISP doesnt provide much of that in the beginning. with python you can create games and simple but useful programs right away. when arc is finished im all for helping to create a good IDE and libraries to it and document it well and create a very easy path for beginners to gte started. then maybe lisp can get popular. i think it will stay a small language though.

pchristensen 18y ago

It's still not a one-click, but I have written install guides thorough enough to work on the first try for CLisp and SBCL: http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-clisp-emacs-and-slime-on-windows-xp/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-clisp-e... http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-sbcl-emacs-and-slime-on-windows-xp/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-sbcl-em... It takes about 15 minutes and includes installing Emacs and SLIME, plus a super basic Emacs tutorial enough to open and save files.

dreish 18y ago

It was pretty easy for me, on my Fedora box: # yum -y install clisp