Prototype Based Programming in Lisp?

Tue Jul 5 09:23:13 UTC 2016

I played around with Kawa around the time I joined Sun which was in 1997.
So it's at least that old.

Regards,
Elias

On 5 July 2016 at 15:34, Alessio Stalla <alessiostalla at gmail.com> wrote:

> ABCL is older, yes. I can't look up the dates now, but it started as an
> embedded interpreter for the J editor surely more than a decade ago, and
> even when it became a standalone project I think Clojure was still in
> Rich's head at best. That said, ABCL never had even .1% of the community
> Clojure has, which is a pity. ABCL is far from perfect, but with a solid
> open source community contributing to it, it could do everything Clojure
> does. Many of Clojure's core features are just a library away:
>
>  - immutable data structures -> FSet
>  - concurrency primitives -> LParallel
>  - STM -> CL-STM (I think)
>  - ClojureScript -> Parenscript
>
> etc. The only things that are still missing from ABCL proper are the
> ability to generate Java classes from Lisp and an easy to use ahead-of-time
> compiler (to produce libraries readily usable from Java and other
> languages). The ecosystem is missing more things, like Java IDE plugins and
> a Java/Maven savvy build tool (I'm sure ASDF could be hacked to become that
> tool). Clojure once didn't have those, too.
>
> Besides ABCL, there are other Lisps for the JVM, most notably Kawa, a
> Scheme which has been existing for many years, it's older than ABCL I think.
>
> I don't want to start a war either, and I'm sure Clojure benefits from its
> clean room design and implementation, but it's sad to see so many wheels
> reinvented, so much effort wasted.
>
> On 4 July 2016 at 23:17, Alexandre Rademaker <arademaker at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I though that ABCL is older than Clojure , am I wrong ?!
>>
>> One big frustration for me was the error handling ! Errors in Clojure are
>> exposed as Java errors, we don't have the amazing CL handlers.
>>
>> Alexandre
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> > On 4 de jul de 2016, at 17:07, Tom Emerson <tremerson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > On Sun, Jul 3, 2016 at 7:25 PM, David McClain
>> > <dbm at refined-audiometrics.com> wrote:
>> >> My impressions from a few years ago was that Clojure was another
>> language
>> >> built for the heck of it, much like Python.  Not particularly well
>> designed[...]
>> >
>> > Rich Hickey didn't create Clojure just for the heck of it: he had very
>> > specific goals in mind and, IMHO, put a lot of thought into the design
>> > of the language and the decisions he made given the design space
>> > (running within the overall JVM environment) and the warts he saw in
>> > other languages, within and without the Lisp family. There are
>> > numerous presentations available online where Rich talks about the
>> > development of Clojure: if you're interested I think they would show
>> > you that his design
>> >
>> >> under the control of one individual[...]
>> >
>> > I'm not sure you can compare Python's BDfL with Rich's position with
>> > Clojure. I don't have a concrete example, but Clojure feels less
>> > bound-up in its creator's blinders than Python. That can also be a
>> > side-effect of its Lisp-nature though.
>> >
>> >> with lots of cheerleading from the small audience.
>> >
>> > Which isn't a bad thing. Any new language requires its evangelization.
>> > I would also posit that from outside the community, Common Lisp is
>> > viewed the same way.
>> >
>> > [...]
>> >> And I know
>> >> essentially nothing of the Java world, and whether or not it is a good
>> thing
>> >> that they are migrating to Clojure.
>> >
>> > That's the crux of it: if you have to co-exist in a Java universe and
>> > want to write in a Lisp, your options are Clojure or Armed Bear Common
>> > Lisp. ABCL is relatively recent and does not have the community
>> > support that Clojure does. The tooling available for Clojure is quite
>> > good, insofar as its Emacs tools are excellent and support for the two
>> > most common Java IDEs (Eclipse and IntelliJ) is steadily improving,
>> > making the transition for Java developers much more friendly. The
>> > software that I'm writing in Clojure is seen by our operations team as
>> > "just another Java binary". It allows my software to integrate into
>> > their existing monitoring and logging systems without them doing
>> > anything different. I also have the entire Java/Scala library
>> > ecosystem available to me: if I need something that doesn't exist in
>> > Clojure I can usually find it in the Java world. The interop between
>> > Clojure and Java is cleaner, in my limited experience, than that
>> > between ABCL and Java.
>> >
>> > While its a tired trope, cross-platform compatibility is good. I
>> > develop on Mac OS X, continuous integration and deployment on Linux,
>> > and my coworkers use generally use Windows. That's not uniquely a
>> > Clojure feature: SBCL, CCL, and LW all run on these different
>> > environments too.
>> >
>> > There are parts of Common Lisp I miss when developing in Clojure,
>> > especially the conditions system. I sometimes miss CLOS, but Clojure
>> > has multimethod dispatch which is good enough for most cases.
>> >
>> > I like both Clojure and Common Lisp, and see them as complementary
>> > tools which I select depending on my needs at any given time. However,
>> > there is a cognitive load in switching between them, and since most of
>> > my work of late is in a Java world, I tend to stick with Clojure even
>> > for nonce tools.
>> >
>> > ClojureScript is amazing if you are creating tools or services that
>> > need a web-based UI, whether for primary interaction or diagnostics.
>> > The entire system can be written in Clojure, with the UI running on
>> > the client browser. You can share code across projects: I have a set
>> > of functions used to generate various sequence comparison statistics
>> > that I share between command-line tools and a single-page web
>> > application that is written in ClojureScript. Before moving to
>> > ClojureScript I had to maintain two versions of these, one in
>> > JavaScript and another in Clojure. I can even make these functions
>> > callable from Java, if I cared to do so.
>> >
>> > Anyway, I don't want to initiate a religious war between Clojure and
>> > CL. I just wanted to give you some reasons why a (Common) Lisper may
>> > also use and enjoy Clojure.
>> >
>> > Peace,
>> >
>> >    -tree
>> >
>> > --
>> > Tom Emerson
>> > tremerson at gmail.com
>> > http://it-is-what-it-is.treerex.net
>> >
>>
>>
>
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