[pro] Learning Lisp the Bump Free Way

[Pascal Costanza]

Alex,

I think your approach is counterproductive. The Common Lisp community is not very large, and to the best of my knowledge, the majority of people _I_ know who are part of this community really try hard to improve the infrastructure, the libraries and the tools, to the extent they can afford to invest time and energy. Telling those people that they suck is not going to motivate them to do better and/or more.

One of the things you can also notice in the communities of more popular languages is that people get a lot more positive feedback, including for a lot more trivial contributions. I believe that this is one of the reasons (not the only one) why those other languages are popular in some cases.

You also have to take into account that most people invest time and energy into things they believe are important, or that are actually important to them. These things may not overlap a lot with the things that are important to you. But who are you to blame them, and who are they to blame you?

I would hope that the Common Lisp community becomes more positive and encouraging, rather than stay negative and discouraging. I believe that would be for the better.


Pascal

On 20 Jan 2011, at 17:04, Alexander Repenning 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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-- 
Pascal Costanza, mailto:pc at p-cos.net, http://p-cos.net
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Software Languages Lab
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium