[Bese-devel] UCW vs Seaside (and Scheme)

[Marco Baringer]

Peter Scott <sketerpot at gmail.com> writes:

>> I have to say I have spent more time learning about Smalltalk/Seaside
>> than I have invested in Lisp/UCW. However, somehow it feels Lisp/UCW
>> seem to provide a better roadmap and more stable platform.

[replying to waldo] where did you get the impression that ucw is a
more stable platform than seaside? (this is just idle curiosity on my
part).

if nothing else seaside has a much larger and more active user
community (its also been around a lot longer).

> UCW is still very unstable, with major parts being ripped out and
> replaced as we speak. Common Lisp is very stable, with a wide
> selection of good compilers, both commercial and open-source. UCW is a
> pleasure to work with, for what it's worth---but I haven't checked out
> Seaside.

just to clarify: i agree the ucw's api is unstable, and i do rip out
and rewrite major parts whenever i feel the need, but it does work and
is being used in production environments.

> Marco is working on (or has added, I'm not sure which) an interpreter
> for a CL-like language which has proper serializable continuations and
> has removed CL's features that conflict with continuations, like
> UNWIND-PROTECT. This promises a significant improvement in things Just
> Working properly, at the cost of one or two orders of magnitude
> slowdown in the interpreted code. The interpreted code isn't a
> bottleneck, so don't worry about it.

the interpreter is in and does everything the old cps transformer did
and then some. support for serializable continuations is in the works.

> I can't speak for scheme, but CL has:
>
> CLSQL: a good interface to a number of SQL databases. I'm particularly
> fond of the reader syntax that prevents SQL-injection problems, among
> other inconveniences. There's also an object-relational mapping, but I
> haven't used it so I can't opine on it.
>
> fare-csv: you can import and export CSV in a straightforward way. I
> found some of the code in this one to be a little amusing, but it
> certainly works well enough.

for what it's worth arnesi also contains a trivial csv reader/writer.

> CL-PDF and cl-typesetting: make PDF files easily, and do so with nice
> typesetting.

i'd be very surpsied if plt or bigloo scheme did not offer equivalent
libraries.

>> At this point, I'm wondering if there is anyone in this list that can
>> shed some light into clearing up where I should be going. I've always
>> been fascinated with Lisp, but never spent enough time to learn it.
>> Now that I have some time, I'd like to know where I should be
>> investing my time more wisely (Lisp, Smalltalk, Scheme). I don't know
>> if I should really rule out Scheme and may be someone could also
>> comment on it.

there's a huge difference between scheme, smalltalk and common
lisp. if you have the time i'd suggest becoming proficent in all
three, i don't feel like suggesting one over the other.

personally i'm a big fan of smalltalk, but (obviously) i'm a far
bigger fan of common lisp.

-- 
-Marco
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget the perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
	-Leonard Cohen