5 ms·
I think the hurdles are less than you think, but Common Lisp is probably not for you. But I think that's fine. There is already a lot of stuff for 'most people'
by lispm 12y ago
I think the hurdles are less than you think, but Common Lisp is probably not for you. But I think that's fine. There is already a lot of stuff for 'most people'. Why does everything need to be built for 'most people'? Why isn't it okay that there are things which are not for most people? Haskell is not for most people, Prolog is not for most people, Coq is not for most people, why does Common Lisp need to be for most people? The article describes why Charlotte Herzeel likes Common Lisp. maybe she is not 'most people'?
* you don't need to read AMOP to use CLOS. It's there if you want to know 'MORE'. Much more. Much more than you ever wanted to know about reflective OOP. Alan Kay of Smalltalk fame recommended the book as the best book on objected-oriented technology in a decade. ordering it over your book store is easy. But I don't recommend it to anyone wanting to learn Lisp. Read it if you want to know how CLOS is implemented or extended. A bonus point: it shows excellent coding style.
* 'Yet none of the links discuss this directly or provide tutorials.' The LispWorks, SBCL, Clozure CL manuals discuss that. Since there is so much stuff to link to, I recommend to go fully old-school and read the fine manual.
* as the starting book most will point you to Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel. Free online and available printed. It even explains a lot of CLOS.
* 'The author goes on to recommend LispWorks as a platform.' I do that too. Not the free version. The full commercial version. I even have the full 64bit 'Enterprise' version of LispWorks on my Mac.
* Web 1.0: Even worse, a comic book about Lisp programming using Common Lisp. http://landoflisp.com http://landoflisp.com
* '$4500 a seat [and calling it Enterprise Edition] is only going to hit some [potentially profitable] edge cases.' - well you may want to compare what a commercial Smalltalk, Ada or Prolog system costs... The market is small and lowering the cost would help letting the company survive. Something must be working for them: LispWorks was first released 25 years ago.
* 'Everything else screams "This ain't for you" at most people.' - well, Common Lisp is not for most people. For most people there are many simpler options. For those wanting to work on fancy Web X.0 stuff in an easy way, there are better options - and that's totally okay.
Common Lisp is not for most people.
For those who want to use Common Lisp as free and no-cost software, the article mentions 'Clozure Common Lisp' and 'SBCL'. I'd say that's excellent choices. I use those, too. Still I prefer the commercial and expensive LispWorks...
- Chattered 12y ago* you don't need to read AMOP to use CLOS. It's there if you want to know 'MORE'. Much more. Much more than you ever wanted to know about reflective OOP. Alan Kay of Smalltalk fame recommended the book as the best book on objected-oriented technology in a decade. ordering it over your book store is easy. But I don't recommend it to anyone wanting to learn Lisp. Certainly not. The AMOP teaches you CLOS assuming you already know CLOS. In the words of Edmund Blackadder describing Johnson's dictionary, it is the most pointless book since "How to learn French" was translated into Fresh. And therein lies its brilliance.
- brudgers 12y agoI'm a fan of reading the fucking manual and thus you're preaching to the choir on that. But I'm not an evangelical baptist about it. Truth is that most people program by page faulting - writing some code, hitting a bug, and googling for a solution, lather rinse repeat. Don't get me wrong, 4500 bucks is probably a bargin. But again the landscape is dominated by FOSS. More to my point the points of comparison are pre-www. Ada, Smalltalk, and Prolog as alternatives suggest a time before twenty-something developers' parents were in college. Those languages were hot at the same time as Lisp Machines. Was an opportunity missed to mention Modula-2 and rotary dial telephones? The Common Lisp community doesn't handle onboarding well. Seibel's Practical Common Lisp is ok, but how long has it been since CD's were an important recorded music medium for people spending their time with computers? Well over a decade since the days of Napster. Coming up on a decade of iTunes. CD's are more old-school than landlines. This is to take nothing away from Common Lisp as a language. It's not a knock on the individuals who make up the Common Lisp community. It's pointing out the Common Lisp community's blind spot. Mcarthy was brilliant. He also could have been Rich Hickey's grandpa. We don't make phonecalls on party lines anymore. Figuring out how to reach the next generation of programmers doesn't require compromising on principle. It does require recognizing that what didn't really work in the past [that is the past since the days when Prolog and Ada were hot, e.g. since C++] probably won't work today, either. I mean, what's the case of Common Lisp over Clojure? And by that I mean: + point me to a webpage that sells me on the idea + has a clear call to action + and looks at least as vibrant as Clojure's homepage
- 12y ago