[pro] Learning Lisp the Bump Free Way

[Drew Crampsie]

On 20 January 2011 12:03, Daniel Weinreb <dlw at itasoftware.com> wrote:
> 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.)

In my own defense, i immediately followed up with this :

"Didn't quite mean to be so abrasive there, hadn't had my coffee and
was in no mood. Accept my apologies for the presentation, but i stand
by the content."

I also did not intend for the discussion to clutter the list. Since
the cat's out of the bag, i suppose i'll chime in publicly.

>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.

It's a bit of both,  to be honest.

The fact that javascript JIT compiler technology comes within 10% of
CCL on some benchmarks isn't a problem that i personally run into, and
the lack of an IDE hasn't stopped me from delivering products in
Common Lisp. Nor has the perceived lack of vibrancy impeded my ability
to find paying work in CL. However, i'm willing to agree that these
problems exist.

I do, however, think that comparing the work produced by the open
source CL community to that produced by multi-billion dollar
corporations is both unfair and counter-productive. Apple and Google
have something to sell, and are aggressively attempting to sell it to
both users and developers. Their /raison d'etre/ is to produce tools
that are useful for the casual developer and used by the masses.

The same can not be said of the Clozure team, the SBCL devs, the SLIME
folk or us working slobs just trying to make a living using CL. If i
had the resources of a mega-corporation behind me, do you think cliki
would be held together with duct-tape and bubble gum, or
common-lisp.net would look old and tired? Would the ALU wiki crash
every few months and be generally a mess to work with? I'd like to
think otherwise.

The root of the perceived problem is a lack of resources, not a lack
of effort or desire on the part of the "lisp community".  There are
many in the "lisp community" working to " IMPLEMENT stuff that is not
just interesting to the Common Lisp community but to computer science
in general", and there are plenty of folk playing with the CCL IDE,
among others. A call to arms such as the OP's sounds to me more like
an order to "work harder" rather then a productive solution or even a
motivating idea.

I suppose i am just tired of hearing, on every lisp forum everywhere,
someone's ideas about what's wrong with CL and how the "lisp
community" can work to fix it when "we're" already working as hard as
we can just to keep things running.

While my (private) reply was admittedly over-the-top rude, it was an
emotional response to feeling as if i'd (we'd?) been shit on for my
(our?) efforts. It's almost enough to make me want to take my toys and
go home.

Cheers,

drewc







>
> 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
>
>
>
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