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Eh, it's debatable. CL has got (github usernames) Shinmera, Fukamachi, ruricolist, edicl, among many others (I have to stop my list somewhere). There are some c

by Jach 5y ago

Eh, it's debatable. CL has got (github usernames) Shinmera, Fukamachi, ruricolist, edicl, among many others (I have to stop my list somewhere). There are some collectives that work on a handful of projects together too. What would help is more word about contributions that already exist -- blog posts (or if possible additions to the Lisp Cookbook (https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/)) and StackOverflow and so on. sabracrolleton has some amazing work for instance cataloging and comparing e.g. the various logging frameworks, test frameworks, json parsers, and more. (Example: https://sabracrolleton.github.io/logging-comparison.html https://sabracrolleton.github.io/logging-comparison.html) More of that I think will be more helpful than more tentpole devs, and more ways for Common Lispers to communicate what's out there even to themselves. A lot of unmentioned people are doing heroic work on those fronts already. Another thing that would help is just a critical mass of devs working in a similar area at the same time, but getting such critical masses is its own problem.

na85 5y ago
Shinmera is one of the big problems in that their web scraping library chokes on CSS selectors with parentheses and their gpio lib simply doesn't work.
- Jach 5y ago
  Yeah, that's why it's debatable.. Some maintainers do a better job than others, or only with a subset of the libraries they've made. I found your bug (and the go-file-it-in-the-other-project non-response); in Shinmera's defense I'd want to be charitable and attribute most shortcomings to him devoting all his time to his video game. One interesting advantage of Lisp (and dynamic languages in general, though Lisp's nicer) in cases like these is that if you can fix it yourself, it's easy to load the fix in. By that I mean, for example, suppose (I have no idea how this lib works) the lookup function has a pre-check on the string for invalid search characters before searching, but after inspecting the code you see no reason why it shouldn't work anyway. You can just jump to the code and edit the pattern or remove the error entirely, send the function to the REPL, and you're good to go. Save a copy in your own code if you need to persist your change. You could even do this while the debugger is active and not have to re-request the web page or lose whatever other state you'd built up until that point...
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    That's extremely cool, but if Lisp is more like Putty than Lego, and you sort of have to mould all features for yourself rather than plugging in some blocks, then it will struggle in this area, I think. Having said that, I would love to use it more.

by Jach 5y ago

na85 5y ago

Shinmera is one of the big problems in that their web scraping library chokes on CSS selectors with parentheses and their gpio lib simply doesn't work.

Jach 5y ago
Yeah, that's why it's debatable.. Some maintainers do a better job than others, or only with a subset of the libraries they've made. I found your bug (and the go-file-it-in-the-other-project non-response); in Shinmera's defense I'd want to be charitable and attribute most shortcomings to him devoting all his time to his video game. One interesting advantage of Lisp (and dynamic languages in general, though Lisp's nicer) in cases like these is that if you can fix it yourself, it's easy to load the fix in. By that I mean, for example, suppose (I have no idea how this lib works) the lookup function has a pre-check on the string for invalid search characters before searching, but after inspecting the code you see no reason why it shouldn't work anyway. You can just jump to the code and edit the pattern or remove the error entirely, send the function to the REPL, and you're good to go. Save a copy in your own code if you need to persist your change. You could even do this while the debugger is active and not have to re-request the web page or lose whatever other state you'd built up until that point...
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  That's extremely cool, but if Lisp is more like Putty than Lego, and you sort of have to mould all features for yourself rather than plugging in some blocks, then it will struggle in this area, I think. Having said that, I would love to use it more.