[pro] Learning Lisp the Bump Free Way

[raito at raito.com]

Quoting Vladimir Sedach <vsedach at gmail.com>:
> 2. There are no libraries to do <X>/I can't find any libraries. 

It may sound shocking, but there's non-programmers out there who
complain if there isn't a free-as-in-beer application to do what they
want. This argument is the programmer corollary. It always appears to
me as though the real argument is "No one else has already done my work
for me." But then, when I first learned C, we got stdio and stdlib, and
nothing else, really, so my view may be skewed. 

I do find discussions that pit the syntaxes of Lisp vs. other languages
very amusing, and not for the reason most Lisp users might. Yes, many
new languages have long drawn out discussions about how their syntax
should change, while Lisp has had the same syntax for a very long time. 
But here's where libraries come in... 

It seems like an awful lot of Lisp libraries exist to wank about with
the language than libraries in other languages, rather than to actually
do the sort of tasks that programmers look to do. This may make it look
like Lisp is defective. After all, if you need a bunch of libraries to
'correct' the language, it can't be any good, right? And because there
seems to be several libraries to 'correct' the same problem in
different ways, it's pretty obvious that the 'community' can't even
agree on how to do it. In some people's minds, this is a problem. 

(And yes, I know that it's a rather superficial view, but from someone
casually considering Lisp, a superficial view is all you're going to
get). 

Neil Gilmore
raito at raito.com