6 ms·

This attitude ("It's good enough for me, I don't care anymore about the learning curve's steepness, and I'm indifferent/enthused that my language is only access

by fab13n 18y ago

This attitude ("It's good enough for me, I don't care anymore about the learning curve's steepness, and I'm indifferent/enthused that my language is only accessible to a tiny minority") captures the CL spirit quite well. It also explains why you have to do so much wheel reinvention when you code in CL: those lower lifeform coders, who you openly despise, produce working, ready-to-use libs for most common tasks on JVM, not for CL dialects. Up to you to reimplement your superior libs in your superior language for your superior self. CL is the perfect language for those who consider that development is not a social activity, and luckily for you, there are a couple of niches where this remains a sustainable delusion. For now. Meanwhile, Clojure carries on the Lisp heritage in the branch of software development that's not going to get extinct soon.

mcxx 18y ago
I don't have that attitude and I'm sorry if you encountered it (it's true the Lisp community could be friendlier, warmer to newcomers). However, what can a I (or any other Lisp programmer for that matter) do about the steep learning cure you mention? You have to try for yourself to learn the language, noone's going to do it for you.
- Retric 18y ago
  what can a I Create a simple working installer for the major OS's that includes a useful IDE, Database connectivity to least one major database and a fully functional web server. Once this is working get some people to write a standard library for date / time functions, file IO, formatting output etc. Never underestimate how difficult it is for a new user to setup a working environment.
  - mcxx 18y ago
    The closest thing at the moment would probably be Lispbox (http://gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/ http://gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/) altough it's a bit outdated, so you'd be better with directly downloading SBCL (http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html). Use cl-build (http://common-lisp.net/project/clbuild/ http://common-lisp.net/project/clbuild/) for to ease library download. and install. I guess it's too complicated for a newcomer, but there's no easier way atm, sorry.
    - Retric 18y ago
      That's my point, you could fix this.
      - mcxx 18y ago
        I get that. I'll definitely consider it. It's on my list of open-source side projects.
        ramchip 18y ago
        Lispbox is a good idea. Target Windows if you can. Setting up Clojure with Emacs on Windows involved a lot of steps and arcane stuff, but now there's a Clojure Box which makes things a lot more pleasant. I've tried SBCL with the Eclipse plugin and it's been a huge PITA. IIRC, I couldn't get libraries to install when I finally gave up. It may have improved since, but I'm not sure. Of course the fact that many cool-sounding CL libraries had defunct websites and inaccessible CVS repos didn't exactly encourage me...
  - jimbokun 18y ago
    For OS X, Ready Lisp is the closest I have seen to what you describe. http://www.newartisans.com/blog/ready-lisp.html http://www.newartisans.com/blog/ready-lisp.html It's Aquamacs combined with SBCL, some documentation, and some should-be-standard CL libraries. Double click and it immediately takes you into a REPL. Aquamacs recognizes most of the usual Mac key bindings, making the Emacs curve not quite so steep.
  - narag 18y ago
    "Create a simple working installer for the major OS's that includes a useful IDE, Database connectivity to least one major database and a fully functional web server..." I'm just learning and my conclusion (by elimination :-)) is that for Windows the best is to use Emacs + SLIME + SBCL. There is an installation guide here: http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/04/09/sbcl-emacs-windows-vista/ http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/04/09/sbcl-emacs-windows-v... In the comments there are instructions to get ASDF working, that I haven't tried yet. I've tried to avoid Emacs, but it seems impossible. Lisp in a Box has a lot of problems, ABLE has still too many bugs and Corman lacks GUI programming without which I can't justify the price. CUSP also has too many bugs. So I'm surrendering and looking at Emacs. For the web server part, just use good old CGIs.
vikram 18y ago
I think CL is suitable for projects which are fluid and have a very few people working on them. Speaking from personal experience 1 person can get an awful lot done in CL, very quickly. Compared to any other scripting language. I've worked with CL, Python and Ruby. There are certain things that I think are impossible to write in Python. I started by writing a domain-specific crawler which extracted certain information from a bunch of sites. But the sites I was crawling changed their design mid way. So I then ended up writing a program in CL, to which I describe the data that the site has. E.g. Name-of-city is "Edinburgh", Address is '15 Market Place, ED12', First-Movie-name is 'Bend it like Beckham', First-showing-date is '15 Jan', First-showing-time is '14:20'. The program then produces a function which when give a page from this website extracts this information in the form of an alist so that it can be pushed into the database. Funnily enough the my site which shows this data runs on django.

by fab13n 18y ago

mcxx 18y ago

I don't have that attitude and I'm sorry if you encountered it (it's true the Lisp community could be friendlier, warmer to newcomers). However, what can a I (or any other Lisp programmer for that matter) do about the steep learning cure you mention? You have to try for yourself to learn the language, noone's going to do it for you.

Retric 18y ago
what can a I Create a simple working installer for the major OS's that includes a useful IDE, Database connectivity to least one major database and a fully functional web server. Once this is working get some people to write a standard library for date / time functions, file IO, formatting output etc. Never underestimate how difficult it is for a new user to setup a working environment.
- mcxx 18y ago
  The closest thing at the moment would probably be Lispbox (http://gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/ http://gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/) altough it's a bit outdated, so you'd be better with directly downloading SBCL (http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html). Use cl-build (http://common-lisp.net/project/clbuild/ http://common-lisp.net/project/clbuild/) for to ease library download. and install. I guess it's too complicated for a newcomer, but there's no easier way atm, sorry.
  - Retric 18y ago
    That's my point, you could fix this.
    - mcxx 18y ago
      I get that. I'll definitely consider it. It's on my list of open-source side projects.
      - ramchip 18y ago
        Lispbox is a good idea. Target Windows if you can. Setting up Clojure with Emacs on Windows involved a lot of steps and arcane stuff, but now there's a Clojure Box which makes things a lot more pleasant. I've tried SBCL with the Eclipse plugin and it's been a huge PITA. IIRC, I couldn't get libraries to install when I finally gave up. It may have improved since, but I'm not sure. Of course the fact that many cool-sounding CL libraries had defunct websites and inaccessible CVS repos didn't exactly encourage me...
- jimbokun 18y ago
  For OS X, Ready Lisp is the closest I have seen to what you describe. http://www.newartisans.com/blog/ready-lisp.html http://www.newartisans.com/blog/ready-lisp.html It's Aquamacs combined with SBCL, some documentation, and some should-be-standard CL libraries. Double click and it immediately takes you into a REPL. Aquamacs recognizes most of the usual Mac key bindings, making the Emacs curve not quite so steep.
- narag 18y ago
  "Create a simple working installer for the major OS's that includes a useful IDE, Database connectivity to least one major database and a fully functional web server..." I'm just learning and my conclusion (by elimination :-)) is that for Windows the best is to use Emacs + SLIME + SBCL. There is an installation guide here: http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/04/09/sbcl-emacs-windows-vista/ http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/04/09/sbcl-emacs-windows-v... In the comments there are instructions to get ASDF working, that I haven't tried yet. I've tried to avoid Emacs, but it seems impossible. Lisp in a Box has a lot of problems, ABLE has still too many bugs and Corman lacks GUI programming without which I can't justify the price. CUSP also has too many bugs. So I'm surrendering and looking at Emacs. For the web server part, just use good old CGIs.

vikram 18y ago

I think CL is suitable for projects which are fluid and have a very few people working on them. Speaking from personal experience 1 person can get an awful lot done in CL, very quickly. Compared to any other scripting language. I've worked with CL, Python and Ruby. There are certain things that I think are impossible to write in Python. I started by writing a domain-specific crawler which extracted certain information from a bunch of sites. But the sites I was crawling changed their design mid way. So I then ended up writing a program in CL, to which I describe the data that the site has. E.g. Name-of-city is "Edinburgh", Address is '15 Market Place, ED12', First-Movie-name is 'Bend it like Beckham', First-showing-date is '15 Jan', First-showing-time is '14:20'. The program then produces a function which when give a page from this website extracts this information in the form of an alist so that it can be pushed into the database. Funnily enough the my site which shows this data runs on django.