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> Common Lisp would greatly benefit from programmers obsessed with making the language more useful to themselves and others today. It's never going to happen.

> Common Lisp would greatly benefit from programmers obsessed with making the language more useful to themselves and others today. It's never going to happen. Lispers were saying this same tune back when I last was using Common Lisp in 2003. Even back then there were better Lisps than Lisp. Perl is a better Lisp than Lisp. Perl gave the world CPAN and, I believe, the first real mainstream usage of a garbage collector (this is before Java and JavaScript, which I guess one could argue were more mainstream but possibly only due to the fact the internet was a much smaller place compared to today). Since then we've gone through PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript (ES6/node), Clojure, Scala, C#, and many other languages slightly off my radar (Rust, Go, Swift, Kotlin, etc.). There is simply no niche Common Lisp could occupy today. The last standard for Common Lisp is ANSI Common Lisp that came out in 1994. With no new movement in modernizing the language, there is simply no point. It's dead, and the effort isn't worth it. Why modernize a crufty Lisp when there is Clojure? Or many other Lisp-ish languages. There is even R6RS/R7RS Scheme today. > First, I wish Common Lisp implementations put in work so that they could play nice with other programming languages. Same song, 20 years later. I remember painfully hacking together "alien" calls (CMUCL's foreign function interface) to use Gtk+. Yes. There really were no Common Lisp bindings for the most popular open source GUI toolkit in 2003 during the era that is probably Common Lisp last great chance at making it out alive. CL was going through a resurgence period and you still couldn't get Lisp to talk to anything. My god, it sucked. And their only documentation was HyperSpec. If anyone is not aware of HyperSpec, I implore you to Google it now and see what the state of Common Lisp was around 2001-2005. I have nothing against Kent Pitman. But the HyperSpec was not doing Lisp any favors. The other thing that burned Lisp was everything was a secret society. HyperSpec was free-ish. Sort of. But not really. It was not a community document. If you were just getting in to Lisp it was already recommended to get the proprietary Allegro Lisp or LispWorks. CLISP and CMUCL where the only open source game in town and they weren't receiving much love. Even SBCL was not going anywhere fast. A good segment of the old Common Lispers were against open source at the precise time they needed to embrace open source. They were stuck in a proprietary world. I could go on, but I'm going to end this rant here. I suspect I'm not alone in being burned by Common Lisp.

rscho 6y ago
You can not like the language, but frankly: 'Why modernize a crufty Lisp when there is Clojure?' is a strange comment. Those two languages have more differences than they have common ground. "It's got parentheses, and all languages with parentheses are equal" is a poor basis for critique. Now, you also speak about Perl in the same way, so ... ?!
reikonomusha 6y ago
I vehemently disagree with your premise. Lisp and its ecosystem have been improving through thousands of hours of volunteer work. The Lisp ecosystem is VERY different than it was 15 years ago and is MUCH better. But the standard for what counts as good, in my opinion, has also increased. I’ve not and never been burned by Common Lisp. I don’t know how you could be burned by it either. I can see how canceling Python 2 could burn someone, but I don’t see how an evergreen standard like that of Common Lisp could. I’m not hurting by there not being a new standard. Functionality is de facto standardized just fine and we live with it just fine. Lisp is like the only language with a useful web-accessible standard. If you ask a Lisper how frequently they visit Stack Overflow or random tutorial websites, you’ll find it’s much less than others. Lisp isn’t a lost cause. It has outlived just about every other thing out there. It just doesn’t outlive these other things with tons of fervent enthusiasm.
NotChina 6y ago
At the request of John McCarthy, Lisp’s creator, no single language that is a member of the Lisp family is to be intended to be the definitive dialect; that is, none is to be called just “LISP.” The CL folks have done exactly this. A serious way to measure the strata layers is to write exit(2) portably without using external packages.
- nibbula 6y ago
  We can call whatever we want Lisp. And everyone does. McCarthy, wisely, didn't want people to bicker over this. But it would be a reasonable assumption that by Lisp, one meant Common Lisp. I'm not sure what you're getting at with exit(2). The CL standard does not include an exit function, because it would be limiting. For example the meaning of exit for an operating system is unclear. But most implementations include a simple exit function. You can do what exit does, more simply in CL than in C, using unwind-protect. You can use the FFI built in to every implementation to write an exit that exactly duplicates what the C stdlib exit(3) and _exit(2). With a very small set of macros, it is portable to all CL implementations. You can even execute the processor abort instruction if it has one. But of course you can't do that portably. But exit written in C is not actually portable, but only looks that way due to a bunch macros.

rscho 6y ago

You can not like the language, but frankly: 'Why modernize a crufty Lisp when there is Clojure?' is a strange comment. Those two languages have more differences than they have common ground. "It's got parentheses, and all languages with parentheses are equal" is a poor basis for critique. Now, you also speak about Perl in the same way, so ... ?!

reikonomusha 6y ago

I vehemently disagree with your premise. Lisp and its ecosystem have been improving through thousands of hours of volunteer work. The Lisp ecosystem is VERY different than it was 15 years ago and is MUCH better. But the standard for what counts as good, in my opinion, has also increased. I’ve not and never been burned by Common Lisp. I don’t know how you could be burned by it either. I can see how canceling Python 2 could burn someone, but I don’t see how an evergreen standard like that of Common Lisp could. I’m not hurting by there not being a new standard. Functionality is de facto standardized just fine and we live with it just fine. Lisp is like the only language with a useful web-accessible standard. If you ask a Lisper how frequently they visit Stack Overflow or random tutorial websites, you’ll find it’s much less than others. Lisp isn’t a lost cause. It has outlived just about every other thing out there. It just doesn’t outlive these other things with tons of fervent enthusiasm.

NotChina 6y ago

At the request of John McCarthy, Lisp’s creator, no single language that is a member of the Lisp family is to be intended to be the definitive dialect; that is, none is to be called just “LISP.” The CL folks have done exactly this. A serious way to measure the strata layers is to write exit(2) portably without using external packages.

nibbula 6y ago
We can call whatever we want Lisp. And everyone does. McCarthy, wisely, didn't want people to bicker over this. But it would be a reasonable assumption that by Lisp, one meant Common Lisp. I'm not sure what you're getting at with exit(2). The CL standard does not include an exit function, because it would be limiting. For example the meaning of exit for an operating system is unclear. But most implementations include a simple exit function. You can do what exit does, more simply in CL than in C, using unwind-protect. You can use the FFI built in to every implementation to write an exit that exactly duplicates what the C stdlib exit(3) and _exit(2). With a very small set of macros, it is portable to all CL implementations. You can even execute the processor abort instruction if it has one. But of course you can't do that portably. But exit written in C is not actually portable, but only looks that way due to a bunch macros.