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When will we get the Future of Lisp?
For a few years now I've had constant flirtations with lisp. Most recently Clojure and Racket, but I'm not fully finding my place yet. At the same time I've found the most amazing programming experience and yet at the same time felt a distance from actually being able to use it professionally.
It may be a stupid question but is there anyone else that just wants a lisp that works like it's syntax. (get out of the way and let you work) And that has the simplicity of scheme with the power of Common Lisp. That has a nice community model that embraces newer technology than mail lists. And has a module system as pleasant to use as Python's or Haskell's. And documentation as pleasant as Python's as well now that I think about it. Something that doesn't try to push exotic theories on computer science or make a huge dramatic change on how I program and just looks around and combines what works together into a useful bundle. But mostly, where the creator doesn't abandon development and let it flip-flop every few years.
That's my Dream Lisp. What's yours?
- kls 15y agoI think Clojure is the closest thing to what you are looking for but the sad part is that it is due to Java giving it a standard library with documentation. While I am by no means a Lisp expert, I have a little experience with Racket and am now doing some stuff (past couple of weeks) in Clojure, I do have to say the Java library documentation is a life saver when you are actually trying to get real work done. I think the fact that Lisp is the king of theoretical CS type development is also it's Achilles heel. In Lisp and academia (which make up a lot of Lisp users), a lot of people do want to reinvent the wheel, as such some get board half way through and leave an undocumented half implemented project in the wild. Discerning quality of third party code is difficult and no one really wants to standardize. I would really like to embrace CL, but it's just too much patching things of unknown quality together in a commercial environment. I think Clojure with it's ability to access Java libs is the best compromise for my ambitions.
- jonsulred 15y agoI thought that too, but while learning it I realized pretty quickly that to learn Clojure you first have to learn Java. For people with Java experience and time it probably isn't a problem, but for a non Java programmer with little time...
- kls 15y agoI never thought about that, I took for granted my Java knowledge, thanks for the insight.
- CyberFonic 15y agonewLISP! It might not please the CL/Scheme experts. BUT it has a very capable API and library of modules. You can deploy it as a single 1/4MB executable. A command line switch will turn it into a http server and already supports IPv6, etc. check it out : www.newlisp.org