5 ms·

The announcement speaks as if web applications in Common Lisp was itself a solved problem. The community surrounding that isn't exactly vibrant. An example fr

The announcement speaks as if web applications in Common Lisp was itself a solved problem. The community surrounding that isn't exactly vibrant. An example from an attempt to find a viable/nice Common Lisp templating library for making web apps (a problem for me before, I hate CL-WHO. Vile.) http://www.cl-user.net/asp/U5Hd/sdataQGW2OvQLz758DQdX8yMX8yBX8yBXnMq=/sdataQu3F$sSHnB== http://www.cl-user.net/asp/U5Hd/sdataQGW2OvQLz758DQdX8yMX8yB... Hrm. Yes. Hrm. Seems promising, exceeeept... https://groups.google.com/group/cl-terrace/web/djula https://groups.google.com/group/cl-terrace/web/djula The Google Group for it has...disappeared? http://common-lisp.net/project/bpm/darcs/djula/ http://common-lisp.net/project/bpm/darcs/djula/ Yay, code! That hasn't been touched since 2008! CL-WHO, which I think is the most popular way to solve this problem hasn't been touched in 2 to 7 months, depending on how you measure it. See here: https://github.com/edicl/cl-who https://github.com/edicl/cl-who The Ningle web framework for Clack, found here: https://github.com/fukamachi/ningle https://github.com/fukamachi/ningle Not been touched in 4-8 months. Caveman (clack framework): https://github.com/fukamachi/caveman/ https://github.com/fukamachi/caveman/ 4-8 months. HTML-TEMPLATE hasn't been touched since Tue, 02 Dec 2008. The most popular web server for CL, Hunchentoot hasn't been touched (based on the darcs repo anyway) since Tue, 24 Aug 2010. Take a look for yourself: http://common-lisp.net/~loliveira/ediware/ http://common-lisp.net/~loliveira/ediware/ The Common Lisp community is moribund at best. I would PREFER to use Common Lisp over, say, Clojure or Python however the fact is that there just aren't enough people using it or maintaining web development software for it to overcome the time expenditure trade-offs. So, can we drop the triumphant tone as it concerns CL? Even Paul Graham tells most people to just use Clojure.

calibraxis 14y ago
Please look more closely. This is "for developers creating mobile applications, rather than web applications". And I don't see any "triumphant tone", but rather just a nice announcement. I pick Clojure more often for my uses (not that I'm as liberated as I'd like in choosing tools), but I can imagine situations where I'd instead use Common Lisp.
- codewright 14y ago
  Please look more closely. This is about the fact that their post about their mobile product took it for granted that web applications was some kind of conquered country for Common Lisp community when it's far from that. Also, their post had that triumphant tone + the Paul Graham name-dropping I referred to.
  - calibraxis 14y ago
    Any discussion of Common Lisp tends towards a classic comp.lang.lisp style flamewar. Strawman exaggerations, complaints about the state of Common Lisp libraries, arguments about someone's "tone"...
wakeup 14y ago
You misunderstand the situation. CL-WHO is not a templating library, and many templating libraries are available (like CL-TEMPLATE). Your point about unmaintained libraries: Most CL libraries are just really stable. Yes a lot of CL code hasn't been touched since 2006 or even 2000. Because it didn't need to be touched. See we have been around for some time. Our ecosystem is quite mature. CL is a language for experienced programmers. It's not a toy like ruby for instance. I can see why a lot of new programmers are put off by the non-consumerist nature of CL. You have to understand that if you develop WITH CL you also develop CL as itself. Small plug: I wasn't happy with CL-WHO either so I created my own HTML generation library. It's like 100 lines of code, and solves my needs http://mr.gy/software/html/ http://mr.gy/software/html/
Syssiphus 14y ago
There is also a lib called 'HTML-TEMPLATE' ( http://weitz.de/html-template/ http://weitz.de/html-template/ ) which is IMO a bit easier to use than CL-WHO. Hunchentoot has been updated, it is just maintained by somebody else now AFAIK ( https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot/downloads https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot/downloads ). I do remember that there was a version (1.2?) that had some backward compatibility problems and that was last year. Try quicklisp ( http://www.quicklisp.org/ http://www.quicklisp.org/ ) for all your lib needs, it is a nice lib repository and it is very up to date (though still beta).
- codewright 14y ago
  I already use quicklisp. I don't like any templating system that mixes frontend with backend.
PuercoPop 14y ago
"The most popular web server for CL, Hunchentoot hasn't been touched (based on the darcs repo anyway) since Tue, 24 Aug 2010." That statement is just untrue, take a look yourself. https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot/commits/master https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot/commits/master Also there is an active community in Japan from what I can gather from github.com They done cl-annot[1], which is a way to annotate functions with the @ syntax from python. Clack[2], the WSGI-equivalent for cl. And the Caveman[3] and Ningle[4] webframeworks. [1]: https://github.com/arielnetworks/cl-annot https://github.com/arielnetworks/cl-annot [2]: https://github.com/fukamachi/clack https://github.com/fukamachi/clack [3]: https://github.com/fukamachi/caveman https://github.com/fukamachi/caveman [4]: https://github.com/fukamachi/ningle https://github.com/fukamachi/ningle
- codewright 14y ago
  I linked Ningle and Caveman in my post and mentioned Clack too. What's your point? They're relatively unmaintained and I still can't find a templating library for CL that isn't awful.
adwf 14y ago
I'm using CL-WHO at the moment and I admit it's not necessarily the easiest way to generate html. But I did spot an alternative the other day called Spinneret: https://github.com/ruricolist/spinneret https://github.com/ruricolist/spinneret I haven't got round to testing it, but it sounds good so I might try writing my next project with it. Having said that, CL-WHO has had some updates recently to add basic support for HTML5. Hunchentoot is also getting fairly consistent updates, I think there is even a websocket extension for it now. I think Quicklisp has been responsible for a resurgence recently in Common Lisp. It used to be quite a pain for new people to get libraries up and running, which of course affected how much they get used/tested; so a common refrain was "Not happy? Just write your own". Now it's much easier to share and use libraries, and I'm seeing a fair bit of interesting development. My favourite example at the moment is cl-parallel: http://lparallel.org/ http://lparallel.org/ Clean documentation, nice looking abstractions for seamlessly parallelizing code, I'm looking forward to trying it out next.
- codewright 14y ago
  Dude, spinneret makes the same goddamn mistake. I don't want my HTML templates in my Common Lisp code! Most of my projects have a separate frontend guy who needs to be able to write the templates himself without touching or knowing the backend code. Django, Rails, Flask, Sinatra et al understand and respect this. For some reason, most Clojure and Common Lisp libraries fail to grok this. I don't know why. I want plain HTML files with some simple (mustache or Django/Jinja-style) tokens for injecting data provided by a hash-map/dictionary/assoc-list. That's. It.
  - jonathlee 14y ago
    I think the templating library you are looking for is cl-mustache. I am using it currently for a SQL template engine in one of my internal work projects.
    - codewright 14y ago
      First one that's shown promise.
Turing_Machine 14y ago
Clojure isn't an option on iOS. No Java, right?
- Turing_Machine 14y ago
  I hadn't been following this lately, so went to check the status of Clojure on iOS Da Goog turns up one person suggesting ClojureScript which (while nifty) isn't the same thing. Another site suggests compiling Clojure to Scheme (which is going to be clumsy at best) or ActionScript (gaaaaaaaah!). Of course, good luck on getting anything with a functioning REPL on iOS anyway (even the original package under discussion).
  - biscarch 14y ago
    Why would you compile Clojure to Scheme? If you know Clojure, wouldn't you be able to write Scheme without too much difficulty?
    - Turing_Machine 14y ago
      I don't know; maybe you have existing Clojure code that you need to use?
  - jimbokun 14y ago
    "Of course, good luck on getting anything with a functioning REPL on iOS anyway" Ruby Motion comes pretty close.

calibraxis 14y ago

Please look more closely. This is "for developers creating mobile applications, rather than web applications". And I don't see any "triumphant tone", but rather just a nice announcement. I pick Clojure more often for my uses (not that I'm as liberated as I'd like in choosing tools), but I can imagine situations where I'd instead use Common Lisp.

codewright 14y ago
Please look more closely. This is about the fact that their post about their mobile product took it for granted that web applications was some kind of conquered country for Common Lisp community when it's far from that. Also, their post had that triumphant tone + the Paul Graham name-dropping I referred to.
- calibraxis 14y ago
  Any discussion of Common Lisp tends towards a classic comp.lang.lisp style flamewar. Strawman exaggerations, complaints about the state of Common Lisp libraries, arguments about someone's "tone"...

wakeup 14y ago

You misunderstand the situation. CL-WHO is not a templating library, and many templating libraries are available (like CL-TEMPLATE). Your point about unmaintained libraries: Most CL libraries are just really stable. Yes a lot of CL code hasn't been touched since 2006 or even 2000. Because it didn't need to be touched. See we have been around for some time. Our ecosystem is quite mature. CL is a language for experienced programmers. It's not a toy like ruby for instance. I can see why a lot of new programmers are put off by the non-consumerist nature of CL. You have to understand that if you develop WITH CL you also develop CL as itself. Small plug: I wasn't happy with CL-WHO either so I created my own HTML generation library. It's like 100 lines of code, and solves my needs http://mr.gy/software/html/ http://mr.gy/software/html/

Syssiphus 14y ago

There is also a lib called 'HTML-TEMPLATE' ( http://weitz.de/html-template/ http://weitz.de/html-template/ ) which is IMO a bit easier to use than CL-WHO. Hunchentoot has been updated, it is just maintained by somebody else now AFAIK ( https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot/downloads https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot/downloads ). I do remember that there was a version (1.2?) that had some backward compatibility problems and that was last year. Try quicklisp ( http://www.quicklisp.org/ http://www.quicklisp.org/ ) for all your lib needs, it is a nice lib repository and it is very up to date (though still beta).

codewright 14y ago
I already use quicklisp. I don't like any templating system that mixes frontend with backend.

PuercoPop 14y ago

"The most popular web server for CL, Hunchentoot hasn't been touched (based on the darcs repo anyway) since Tue, 24 Aug 2010." That statement is just untrue, take a look yourself. https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot/commits/master https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot/commits/master Also there is an active community in Japan from what I can gather from github.com They done cl-annot[1], which is a way to annotate functions with the @ syntax from python. Clack[2], the WSGI-equivalent for cl. And the Caveman[3] and Ningle[4] webframeworks. [1]: https://github.com/arielnetworks/cl-annot https://github.com/arielnetworks/cl-annot [2]: https://github.com/fukamachi/clack https://github.com/fukamachi/clack [3]: https://github.com/fukamachi/caveman https://github.com/fukamachi/caveman [4]: https://github.com/fukamachi/ningle https://github.com/fukamachi/ningle

codewright 14y ago
I linked Ningle and Caveman in my post and mentioned Clack too. What's your point? They're relatively unmaintained and I still can't find a templating library for CL that isn't awful.

adwf 14y ago

I'm using CL-WHO at the moment and I admit it's not necessarily the easiest way to generate html. But I did spot an alternative the other day called Spinneret: https://github.com/ruricolist/spinneret https://github.com/ruricolist/spinneret I haven't got round to testing it, but it sounds good so I might try writing my next project with it. Having said that, CL-WHO has had some updates recently to add basic support for HTML5. Hunchentoot is also getting fairly consistent updates, I think there is even a websocket extension for it now. I think Quicklisp has been responsible for a resurgence recently in Common Lisp. It used to be quite a pain for new people to get libraries up and running, which of course affected how much they get used/tested; so a common refrain was "Not happy? Just write your own". Now it's much easier to share and use libraries, and I'm seeing a fair bit of interesting development. My favourite example at the moment is cl-parallel: http://lparallel.org/ http://lparallel.org/ Clean documentation, nice looking abstractions for seamlessly parallelizing code, I'm looking forward to trying it out next.

codewright 14y ago
Dude, spinneret makes the same goddamn mistake. I don't want my HTML templates in my Common Lisp code! Most of my projects have a separate frontend guy who needs to be able to write the templates himself without touching or knowing the backend code. Django, Rails, Flask, Sinatra et al understand and respect this. For some reason, most Clojure and Common Lisp libraries fail to grok this. I don't know why. I want plain HTML files with some simple (mustache or Django/Jinja-style) tokens for injecting data provided by a hash-map/dictionary/assoc-list. That's. It.
- jonathlee 14y ago
  I think the templating library you are looking for is cl-mustache. I am using it currently for a SQL template engine in one of my internal work projects.
  - codewright 14y ago
    First one that's shown promise.

Turing_Machine 14y ago

Clojure isn't an option on iOS. No Java, right?

Turing_Machine 14y ago
I hadn't been following this lately, so went to check the status of Clojure on iOS Da Goog turns up one person suggesting ClojureScript which (while nifty) isn't the same thing. Another site suggests compiling Clojure to Scheme (which is going to be clumsy at best) or ActionScript (gaaaaaaaah!). Of course, good luck on getting anything with a functioning REPL on iOS anyway (even the original package under discussion).
- biscarch 14y ago
  Why would you compile Clojure to Scheme? If you know Clojure, wouldn't you be able to write Scheme without too much difficulty?
  - Turing_Machine 14y ago
    I don't know; maybe you have existing Clojure code that you need to use?
- jimbokun 14y ago
  "Of course, good luck on getting anything with a functioning REPL on iOS anyway" Ruby Motion comes pretty close.