Quoting Vladimir Sedach vsedach@gmail.com:
- 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@raito.com