Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL projects, as I myself may do soon: Nathan Froyd, Henrik Hjelte, Hans Hübner, David Lichteblau, Gabor Melis, Nikodemus Siivola, etc.
Some of their projects have lots of unanswered PRs on github an some even break when compiled with a recent Quicklisp and/or the newest ASDF. Many don't break yet, but issue warnings and may break in the future.
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that maintenance.
Since I'm jumping ship, I won't be the one to fork these projects and give them a new home (though I'm available to do it, for my consulting fee, if there's enough of a market). Some of you CL professionals should do it and/or fund it. https://github.com/sharplispers might be a good home.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org If being against something is a phobia, then being for is mania. Peace and understanding through slurs of mental illness. Homomania, islamomania, etc.
What do you think are the most high priority projects that require maintaining?
-- Burton
On Dec 16, 2017, at 9:58 PM, Faré fahree@gmail.com wrote:
Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL projects, as I myself may do soon: Nathan Froyd, Henrik Hjelte, Hans Hübner, David Lichteblau, Gabor Melis, Nikodemus Siivola, etc.
Some of their projects have lots of unanswered PRs on github an some even break when compiled with a recent Quicklisp and/or the newest ASDF. Many don't break yet, but issue warnings and may break in the future.
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that maintenance.
Since I'm jumping ship, I won't be the one to fork these projects and give them a new home (though I'm available to do it, for my consulting fee, if there's enough of a market). Some of you CL professionals should do it and/or fund it. https://github.com/sharplispers might be a good home.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org If being against something is a phobia, then being for is mania. Peace and understanding through slurs of mental illness. Homomania, islamomania, etc.
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 12:51 AM, Burton Samograd burton.samograd@gmail.com wrote:
What do you think are the most high priority projects that require maintaining?
Highest priority are probably those projects that currently break on Quicklisp yet are dependencies of other projects: madeira-port, mgl-pax.
In github.com/fare-patches, there are 16 CL repositories I cloned for which I sent build PRs, often months ago. (Also four unrelated forks of healthy non-CL repos; ignore them.) I also have a patch for s-dot which is not on github. These are all candidates for sharplisping if the maintainers are confirmed not available anymore and anyone cares (beware: in some cases, the maintainer is still there, e.g. fukamachi, just not responsive to those PRs).
If you're serious about in-depth curation of the ecosystem, then you'd have to see which maintainers have quit (see a partial list in previous email), and migrate their libraries en masse to sharplispers, though you'll find that *some* of these libraries already have new maintainers who may or may not be motivated to seriously maintain them, so you'll have to see with them what is best. Some ex-maintainers may be willing to add a redirection from their repository to yours (at least if it's on github), or to give you the keys to their repositories (particularly so if on gitlab.common-lisp.net).
Some libraries are not broken but are piling PRs, e.g. cl-json, bknr. Some libraries have serious bugs and/or are not portable enough in some features, e.g. bordeaux-threads. Some libraries are broken and better left to rot. Some libraries might be better merged, or transformed into thin compatibility layers on top of a common library (like so many test libraries, or things that could be superseded by uiop — see also my post on consolidation https://fare.livejournal.com/169346.html ). Some libraries just need better documentation, tests and examples.
I personally believe that many the libraries I'm leaving behind are useful and deserve a new maintainer (see on github.com/fare). Of them only ASDF is really popular. At least none of them is currently broken. Some of them have a lot of potential, obviously unfulfilled (e.g. lisp-interface-library), and many are possibly underrated because underdocumented (cl-launch, command-line-arguments, inferior-shell, uiop, cl-scripting).
As for me, I'm jumping ship to Gerbil Scheme (cons.io) — but I just want to leave the place tidy and in good hands as I leave CL behind.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again." — TV listing for the Wizard of Oz in the Marin Independent Journal
On 12/16/17 11:13 PM, Faré wrote:
As for me, I'm jumping ship to Gerbil Scheme (cons.io) — but I just want to leave the place tidy and in good hands as I leave CL behind.
Faré,
It's been about 10 years since we met up in "old" Oakland and it was a lot of fun to hear about the high level lisp work at ITA. I wish you the best in writing software, doing the things you love, and hope that from time to time you can check back in with old projects and friends.
Regards, Elliott
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 6:58 AM, Faré fahree@gmail.com wrote:
Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL projects, as I myself may do soon: Nathan Froyd, Henrik Hjelte, Hans Hübner, David Lichteblau, Gabor Melis, Nikodemus Siivola, etc.
Is there a confirmation from all of the listed (and also unlisted) persons on the fact that they have stopped maintaining their stuff altogether? As you say below, there are a number of people who are not very active, but continue accepting occasional patches - that's, actually, very little work given the stability of most of their important projects that the community relies upon. I know about Nathan, and the majority of his projects are already taken care of by sharplispers.
Some of their projects have lots of unanswered PRs on github an some even break when compiled with a recent Quicklisp and/or the newest ASDF. Many don't break yet, but issue warnings and may break in the future.
It would be great to see a list of those projects to be able to assess the scale of the issue.
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that maintenance.
Since I'm jumping ship, I won't be the one to fork these projects and give them a new home (though I'm available to do it, for my consulting fee, if there's enough of a market). Some of you CL professionals should do it and/or fund it. https://github.com/sharplispers might be a good home.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org If being against something is a phobia, then being for is mania. Peace and understanding through slurs of mental illness. Homomania, islamomania, etc.
Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL projects, as I myself may do soon:
Is there a confirmation from all of the listed (and also unlisted) persons on the fact that they have stopped maintaining their stuff altogether? As you say below, there are a number of people who are not very active, but continue accepting occasional patches - that's, actually, very little work given the stability of most of their important projects that the community relies upon. I know about Nathan, and the majority of his projects are already taken care of by sharplispers.
At least Edi Weitz, Hans Huebner, Nathan Froyd have made it official (and soon me). Gabor Melis, Nikodemus Siivola — maybe it's just me they've been ignoring me for months on github, by mail and on twitter; maybe they still think they'll get back to Lisp some day; in the meantime their software has bitrotted on Quicklisp. David Lichteblau, Cyrus Harmon, Henrik Hjelte, Andreas Fuchs, Kevin Rosenberg, Samium Gromoff — I believe at least some of them have made it official. There are many more authors who have quit whose name doesn't come to me at this point, but that you'll identify as you skim the list of packages of Quicklisp. And there are just orphan packages, untouched in years.
And sometimes abandoned packages still work great, or are unused anyway, so that's fine. Software lives, software dies. Sometimes peacefully, sometimes in a fire.
However, consider that if you migrate to Sharplispers too eagerly, you may waste time; but if you wait for the bitrot to set in before you fork any given library, you won't see the PRs piling before the project is in such disarray that three people reimplement from scratch libraries that each do the 20% they need, further balkanizing the community.
I believe CL could benefit a lot from a little bit more coordination on library development and maintenance. But obviously, part of the reason I'm jumping ship is that I don't believe this is going to happen (the other part is my wanting to do things that can't be done on top of CL-provided abstractions). The activation energy for some kinds of interactions is too high in CL. And that's fine, to each his own.
It would be great to see a list of those projects to be able to assess the scale of the issue.
Not my job anymore. I would just rather pass the baton as I leave than drop it on the floor. But I'll drop it if no one takes it.
I used to chase after authors whose systems I broke as I evolved ASDF and it didn't support their abuse of ASDF internals or use of deprecated ASDF functionality, and so I noticed a lot of things (and remained blind to others of course). If anyone after me decides to keep improving ASDF (rather than merely keep it running as is), he'll notice as much.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org Suggesting I hate people with religion because I hate religion is like suggesting I hate people with cancer because I hate cancer. — Ricky Gervais
It would be interesting to see a serious study about how such coordination happens in other ecosystems. In some cases, it looks like the environment impose the coordination somehow (ex: R). In cases like Python, despite the messy proliferation of libraries with redundant functionalities, people seen to be happy (or ignorant about the problems). Haskell is trying to address version dependencies, but it looks still complicated to understand the options available. Anyway, for me, it is a social issue more than a technical one.
But from time to time we see a significant transformation, I believe we all agree about the huge impact of Quicklisp!
Best,
-- Alexandre Rademaker http://arademaker.github.io http://arademaker.github.io/ http://researcher.ibm.com/person/br-alexrad http://researcher.ibm.com/person/br-alexrad
On 17 Dec 2017, at 05:51, Faré fahree@gmail.com wrote:
I believe CL could benefit a lot from a little bit more coordination on library development and maintenance. But obviously, part of the reason I'm jumping ship is that I don't believe this is going to happen (the other part is my wanting to do things that can't be done on top of CL-provided abstractions). The activation energy for some kinds of interactions is too high in CL. And that's fine, to each his own.
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 6:17 AM, Alexandre Rademaker arademaker@gmail.com wrote:
It would be interesting to see a serious study about how such coordination happens in other ecosystems.
I just saw a tweet by someone thanking the PHP community for how it welcome him to programming, etc., promptly followed by many metoo's. PHP the language may suck, badly, but apparently, the community has something to teach us.
I believe an important feature for a language is low overhead to starting to program. Between files, packages, modules and systems, classes and structures, portability issues, etc., CL requires a lot of overhead just to get into it. This creates a barrier to entry. Attempts to simplify like quick-build or asdf-inferred-system only help so much when a lot of complexity is inherent to the copious standard or lack thereof (depending on the topic). Quicklisp tremendously lowered the barrier to reusing other people's code, but didn't by itself change the culture, document the code, or consolidate divergent efforts. Lispers remain by and large individualists who don't program in large herds and don't know how to.
In some cases, it looks like the environment impose the coordination somehow (ex: R). In cases like Python, despite the messy proliferation of libraries with redundant functionalities, people
seen
to be happy (or ignorant about the problems). Haskell is trying to address version dependencies, but it looks still complicated to understand the options available. Anyway, for me, it is a social issue more than a technical one.
Social and technical are very much linked. See for instance the essay that got me started with ASDF: https://fare.livejournal.com/149264.html — by implementing the technical feature that ASDF could upgrade itself, the social incentives switched for all players from "upgrading ASDF is socially toxic" to "not upgrading ASDF is socially slightly detrimental".
Some of the overhead of CL is builtin the language and its ecosystem and too costly to remove (see above). Some of the barriers to entry can be adressed: writing tutorials, curating and documenting libraries, providing easily documented and easily found solutions to common problems, and cheaper bridges to other ecosystems, etc.
It's a lot of work, but it's also about having a technical kernel suitable to foster cooperation.
But from time to time we see a significant transformation, I believe we
all
agree about the huge impact of Quicklisp!
Yes, Xach single-handedly solved a great number of problems for all CL hackers, where many others tried and failed after burning out. He deserves a lot of praises.
-#f
Hello Faré,
Thanks for this. I'd be interested in joining sharplispers. Does anyone know the process for that?
I'm willing and likely capable of helping, but I don't have time to actively find a project to adopt. So a more central place for issues to be handled, regardless of project, is attractive.
Maybe this could be a topic at the 2018 ELS in Marbella?
-Jason
On 17 Dec 2017, at 05:58, Faré fahree@gmail.com wrote:
Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL projects, as I myself may do soon: Nathan Froyd, Henrik Hjelte, Hans Hübner, David Lichteblau, Gabor Melis, Nikodemus Siivola, etc.
Some of their projects have lots of unanswered PRs on github an some even break when compiled with a recent Quicklisp and/or the newest ASDF. Many don't break yet, but issue warnings and may break in the future.
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that maintenance.
Since I'm jumping ship, I won't be the one to fork these projects and give them a new home (though I'm available to do it, for my consulting fee, if there's enough of a market). Some of you CL professionals should do it and/or fund it. https://github.com/sharplispers might be a good home.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org If being against something is a phobia, then being for is mania. Peace and understanding through slurs of mental illness. Homomania, islamomania, etc.
Thanks for this. I'd be interested in joining sharplispers. Does anyone know the process for that?
Ask Xach or Luis or some other administrator of sharplispers.
I'm willing and likely capable of helping, but I don't have time to actively find a project to adopt. So a more central place for issues to be handled, regardless of project, is attractive.
A lot of projects only require light maintenance and a common pool of maintainers make a lot of sense for them.
Maybe this could be a topic at the 2018 ELS in Marbella?
Only if you find a sucker^Wvolunteer. Every year there's a new kid in the block who wants to curate CL libraries. So far, Xach is an exception in actually doing it and sticking to it year after year. Make Lispers cooperate is hard. Something about herding cats. Weak coordination models work best in this context, otherwise you'll burn out. My 2010 paper on ASDF had the subtitle "More Cooperation, Less Coordination".
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org Those "organizers" who confuse coordination and cooperation will have 100% coordination for 0% cooperation. All costs, no benefits.
Hey Jason,
You're quite welcome to jump in straight away and review pending pull requests or issues.
I think that's the hardest part of maintenance, reviewing submissions that don't scratch any of one's own itches. (With the sharplispers projects, there's the additional challenge of dealing with unfamiliar codebases.)
If you'd like to adopt a new project, you can send a message to sharplispers@googlegroups.com. In the group's archives you will also find a fun proposal by Nikodemus to import projects from the CMU AI repository.
Cheers, Luís
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 10:24 Jason Cornez jcornez@alum.mit.edu wrote:
Hello Faré,
Thanks for this. I'd be interested in joining sharplispers. Does anyone know the process for that?
I'm willing and likely capable of helping, but I don't have time to actively find a project to adopt. So a more central place for issues to be handled, regardless of project, is attractive.
Maybe this could be a topic at the 2018 ELS in Marbella?
-Jason
On 17 Dec 2017, at 05:58, Faré fahree@gmail.com wrote:
Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL projects, as I myself may do soon: Nathan Froyd, Henrik Hjelte, Hans Hübner, David Lichteblau, Gabor Melis, Nikodemus Siivola, etc.
Some of their projects have lots of unanswered PRs on github an some even break when compiled with a recent Quicklisp and/or the newest ASDF. Many don't break yet, but issue warnings and may break in the future.
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that maintenance.
Since I'm jumping ship, I won't be the one to fork these projects and give them a new home (though I'm available to do it, for my consulting fee, if there's enough of a market). Some of you CL professionals should do it and/or fund it. https://github.com/sharplispers might be a good home.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org If being against something is a phobia, then being for is mania. Peace and understanding through slurs of mental illness. Homomania, islamomania, etc.
Gary -- Don't be discouraged, and don't stop trying. Lisp has a long learning curve...
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 6:25 AM, gwking - metabang gwking@metabang.com wrote:
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that maintenance.
I may be a fart and I may be old but I’m not an old fart :-).
Fare, thank you for your contributions. Ever since your "jumping ship" article earlier this year, I too have considered doing the same. I have been mostly silently listening to your reasoning, but all of it hit home with me as well. While I haven't been using CL for very long -- a decade -- I believe the time has also come for myself to take what I have learned and switch my focus elsewhere. Good luck in your goals with Gerbil, and thank you for your contributions and giving me a lot to think about this past year.
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 9:56 AM, Steve Haflich shaflich@gmail.com wrote:
Gary -- Don't be discouraged, and don't stop trying. Lisp has a long learning curve...
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 6:25 AM, gwking - metabang gwking@metabang.com wrote:
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that maintenance.
I may be a fart and I may be old but I’m not an old fart :-).
Thank goodness. We could use some peace and quiet in this graveyard.
So to what has everyone switched? Javascript? Clojure? Go? Gardening?
-hk
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 11:35 AM, Michael Fiano michael.fiano@gmail.com wrote:
Fare, thank you for your contributions. Ever since your "jumping ship" article earlier this year, I too have considered doing the same. I have been mostly silently listening to your reasoning, but all of it hit home with me as well. While I haven't been using CL for very long -- a decade -- I believe the time has also come for myself to take what I have learned and switch my focus elsewhere. Good luck in your goals with Gerbil, and thank you for your contributions and giving me a lot to think about this past year.
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 9:56 AM, Steve Haflich shaflich@gmail.com wrote:
Gary -- Don't be discouraged, and don't stop trying. Lisp has a long learning curve...
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 6:25 AM, gwking - metabang gwking@metabang.com wrote:
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that maintenance.
I may be a fart and I may be old but I’m not an old fart :-).
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 12:02 PM, Ken Tilton kentilton@gmail.com wrote:
Thank goodness. We could use some peace and quiet in this graveyard.
So to what has everyone switched? Javascript? Clojure? Go? Gardening?
Last I heard, Andreas Fuchs joined a Ruby shop. Hans Huebner embraced Clojure. Gabor Melis joined a Java/C++/Go/Python shop. Peter Seibel joined a Python shop. I (FR Rideau) adopted Gerbil Scheme. Edi Weitz is teaching, though probably still using CL.
I don't know what languages other former active CL community members have adopted, if any. If you're interested in conducting short interviews, I'm interested in reading the results. But not interested enough to conduct the interviews myself.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined. — Samuel Goldwyn
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Alexandre Rademaker -
Burton Samograd -
Elliott Johnson -
Faré -
gwking - metabang -
Jason Cornez -
Ken Tilton -
Luís Oliveira -
Michael Fiano -
Steve Haflich -
Vsevolod Dyomkin