[pro] Learning Lisp the Bump Free Way

[Brian Taylor]

Alex: I realize this isn't your central point but I'm curious what
benchmark(s) you're citing?

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 11:04 AM, Alexander Repenning <ralex at cs.colorado.edu
> wrote:

> One point made:
>
> > It’s probably faster than most dynamic languages.
>
> is still mostly true but as I am tracking the speed of JavaScript versus
> Common Lisp I can see a scary performance cross over point in the near
> future (months). Already, in some of our benchmarks JavaScript running in OS
> X Chrome is getting very close (10% gap) to Clozure Common Lisp. Why is
> that? Common Lisp has gone STALE. The Common Lisp community preserves Lisp
> instead of advancing it. The result: flatline! As far as I can tell non of
> the exciting JIT compiler technologies developed in the last couple of years
> have made it into any CL implementation. If you follow this trend you may
> conclude the right thing to do, if you want to continue to use Lisp, would
> be to compile it down to JavaScript, yes, JavaScript, not C or direct to
> binary.
>
> Same thing with IDEs: stale, flatline.. Perhaps with the exception of
> LispWorks it appears that most Lisp programmers are just fine with Emacs.
> Well, Emacs was great 35 years ago. Remember the actually innovative IDEs of
> Lisp on Lisp machines? Is SLIME really the best we can do now? Take Clozure
> CL. As far as I can tell most people, including some the developers perhaps,
> are using SLIME too. Start using something new. For instance start using the
> Cocoa based CCL IDE. Yes, still primitive but with real opportunities to
> create some fine IDE tools that actually would look OK even to a 21 Century
> computer science students. Nowadays, even browser (e.g., Safari and FireFox)
> have debugging tools built in that make SLIME look like last century
> technology that belongs to a computer museum.
>
> The Lisp community is not only small but also fragmented. The 21 century
> computer science world need no more essays explaining why Common Lisp is the
> way it is (stale). It is time to leap into action and to IMPLEMENT stuff
> that is not just interesting to the Common Lisp community but to computer
> science in general. Play with Clozure Common Lisp the IDE version (Mac and
> Window). Do not just get frustrated and switch back to Slime but ask
> yourself "what can YOU do for Common Lisp (or more specifically CCL) to make
> it cool again"
>
> best,  Alex
>
>
>
>
> On Jan 19, 2011, at 3:06 PM, Daniel Weinreb wrote:
>
> > This is a very nice essay to help people get over their
> > initial problems with Lisp:
> >
> > http://pavelpenev.posterous.com/learning-lisp-the-bump-free-way
>
> Prof. Alexander Repenning
>
> University of Colorado
> Computer Science Department
> Boulder, CO 80309-430
>
> vCard: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf
>
>
>
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