lisp.org

[Daniel Herring]

Hi all,

Nick is pointing to a big elephant in the room.


On Thu, 12 Oct 2017, Nick Levine wrote:

> The website at lisp.org contained a photo of John McCarthy (and nothing else) since the week he died six years ago. What's the message?
>
> In contrast take a quick look at (say) python.org, a site devoted to really assisting people to use that language.
>
> Do we care, and if we do how do we go about effecting change?


For years, there was talk of developing lisp.org to become a friendly 
portal for all Lisp dialects.  The basic idea was to structure the site in 
a useful way for a few key groups, roughly young beginners, seasoned 
developers, and managers.

Students and young developers would get directed towards educational 
programs and their associated ecosystems.  More advanced developers would 
get guidance on how to choose the right dialect and implementation for 
their focus, pointers to educational resources, pointers to support 
groups, a jobs forum, etc.  Managers would get business success stories, 
explanations of the value proposition of Lisp, professional contacts, etc. 
A generic section would also cover topics like "what features are common 
in Lisp languages?" (NOT "what is a Lisp?"), present common history like 
the Lisp family tree, have directories of websites, books, and journals, 
etc.

There were multiple false starts at accomplishing this.  Tim Daly had a 
friend build one prototype.  He presented many good ideas but there were 
some strong points of contention.  After this, I tried addressing those 
issues, circulating a site outline, and there was talk of how we might 
contributors from the various dialects.  etc.

Two key challenges:  (1) Assemble a community around lisp.org (not 
common-lisp.net or schemers.org or racket-lang.org or clojure.org or ...). 
(2) Find someone with the experience and energy to make this happen.

Funding was not the issue.  Server technology was a distracting issue.


- Daniel