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> I daydream about a Clojure with the missing pieces filled in Be the change you want to see in the world and start filling in the missing pieces! ;-)

mikelevins 7y ago
That's a fair response. I've thought about working on a Clojure implementation on a Common Lisp runtime, precisely because I'd like to see a Clojure that is a real, proper Lisp. Cloture is an interesting effort: https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture I hope ruricolist succeeds. But so far I haven't actually done any work in that direction. When I work on interpreters and compilers, I generally work on trying to improve upon Common Lisp, rather than trying to help Clojure catch up to it. Years ago, in the early 1990s, I worked on an experimental OS at Apple. It was written mostly in a Lisp called Ralph (which later evolved into Dylan). Ralph was basically Scheme's kernel operations on top of data types built on CLOS with some functional-programming idioms. Ralph had all of the nice things I was pining for in that post that I previously linked, but it was also a smaller, simpler, and more consistent language than Common Lisp, and it was easier to learn and easier to extend. I've been working for years now on a language that started as a Ralph embedded in Common Lisp, but which has mutated quite a bit over the years as I learned new things and experimented with adding them to my implementations. It's been complete enough for me to ship a few products with it, but it's not done, and lately I've been inclined to steer it more back toward Ralph. Mostly. There are still a few newer features I might like to keep. So, while I acknowledge that it's totally fair of you to exhort me to work on Clojure, and it's not necessarily a bad idea, there is another Lisp for me to work on that is dearer to me.

mikelevins 7y ago

That's a fair response. I've thought about working on a Clojure implementation on a Common Lisp runtime, precisely because I'd like to see a Clojure that is a real, proper Lisp. Cloture is an interesting effort: https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture I hope ruricolist succeeds. But so far I haven't actually done any work in that direction. When I work on interpreters and compilers, I generally work on trying to improve upon Common Lisp, rather than trying to help Clojure catch up to it. Years ago, in the early 1990s, I worked on an experimental OS at Apple. It was written mostly in a Lisp called Ralph (which later evolved into Dylan). Ralph was basically Scheme's kernel operations on top of data types built on CLOS with some functional-programming idioms. Ralph had all of the nice things I was pining for in that post that I previously linked, but it was also a smaller, simpler, and more consistent language than Common Lisp, and it was easier to learn and easier to extend. I've been working for years now on a language that started as a Ralph embedded in Common Lisp, but which has mutated quite a bit over the years as I learned new things and experimented with adding them to my implementations. It's been complete enough for me to ship a few products with it, but it's not done, and lately I've been inclined to steer it more back toward Ralph. Mostly. There are still a few newer features I might like to keep. So, while I acknowledge that it's totally fair of you to exhort me to work on Clojure, and it's not necessarily a bad idea, there is another Lisp for me to work on that is dearer to me.