[cltl3-devel] RFC: CLtL3 Charter

[Malcolm Reynolds]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Drew Crampsie<drewc at tech.coop> wrote:
> 2009/9/1 Gustavo <gugamilare at gmail.com>:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I also like to keep things simple. Here are a few suggestions, though.
>>
>> In paragraph 4, you didn't mention "sockets" explicitly in the list. I don't
>> know if that is intended to be included in "Networking", because Unix
>> sockets are local to the computer.
>
> To be quite honest, i don't know if CLtL3 actually needs sockets or
> networking. If we have FFI and extensible streams, we can build
> sockets and networking as library code.. right? I'm interested in
> hearing dissent on this one.
>

I've only been working with CL for 6 months so take all my opinions
with that in mind.. but I think not having native sockets / networking
is a big minus for a language in this day and age. To a relative
beginner like me, having to use FFI (I know what this is but have
never touched it myself) and extensible streams (I don't really have a
concrete idea of what these entail, is it in any way similar to Java
*OutputStream classes?) just to write to the network seems like quite
a lot of hoops to jump through as opposed to just using some
standardised functions. And I understand the situation now is that
there are a plethora of networking libraries, which no doubt causes
confusion when coming to the language for the first time... I think
forcing implementations to include network code which you can rely on
to be maintained and debugged is a big win.

Cheers,

Malcolm