[pro] Learning Lisp the Bump Free Way

[Daniel Weinreb]

Alexander,

Here's my own interpretation of what Drew said, which I admit
may or may not be what he had in mind.  (I do agree that he
said it in a rude way.)  The heart of what he wrote is:
>>
>> And i'm not convinced a mailing list for professional lisp developers
>> needs more diatribes explaining how _we_ should 'fix' Common Lisp to
>> make it 'cool' again.
This could be interpreted as "We don't need to do [those things]",
but I think (hope) what he really meant was that it's not
constructive to just *say* that we ought to do those things.
It's more constructive to discuss why.

For a long time, I've been saying:

- The languages that have been vibrant and for which tools
are flourishing are the ones that are (a) perceived as
exciting, and/or (b) used by a large and/or growing
community.  It's hard to make this happen for Common
Lisp.

(Just for one example: consider why lisp.org still makes Lisp look like
a dusty historical artifact, as compared with python.org
or ruby.org.  The reasons for this are somewhat complicated
and historical, but, for whatever reasons, the problem
persists.)

- Nobody is paid to create better open-source Lisp programming
environments.  Doing a good IDE is hard.  Even doing a Lisp
plugin for Eclipse (which lets you share some of its existing
mechanisms) is hard enough that the only one I know of
is still pretty basic.  Even here at ITA where so many of
us use Lisp, I don't think we have one person assigned
to improve or supersede Slime.  We are trying get better code
coverage checking so that we can improve our unit testing,
but that's the only such thing going on that I am aware of.

- There is a lot of obsolete stuff in Common Lisp.  I and others
have written about this at some length.  See 
http://ilc2009.scheming.org/node/7.

As for me, if the Google acquisition of ITA happens, chances
are that I won't be allowed to use Common Lisp, and that
it's unlikely that I'll ever have a chance to use it for
a paid job ever again.  Not impossible, but unlikely.
There are reasons for that.

So as much as we may agree with the problems you are
talking about, it's very hard to solve them for real.

-- Dan