On 20 January 2011 12:03, Daniel Weinreb <dlw@itasoftware.com> wrote:

Alexander,

Here's my own interpretation of what Drew said, which I admit may or may not be what he had in mind.  (I do agree that he said it in a rude way.)

In my own defense, i immediately followed up with this : "Didn't quite mean to be so abrasive there, hadn't had my coffee and was in no mood. Accept my apologies for the presentation, but i stand by the content." I also did not intend for the discussion to clutter the list. Since the cat's out of the bag, i suppose i'll chime in publicly.

The heart of what he wrote is:

...

...

And i'm not convinced a mailing list for professional lisp developers needs more diatribes explaining how _we_ should 'fix' Common Lisp to make it 'cool' again.

This could be interpreted as "We don't need to do [those things]", but I think (hope) what he really meant was that it's not constructive to just *say* that we ought to do those things. It's more constructive to discuss why.

It's a bit of both, to be honest. The fact that javascript JIT compiler technology comes within 10% of CCL on some benchmarks isn't a problem that i personally run into, and the lack of an IDE hasn't stopped me from delivering products in Common Lisp. Nor has the perceived lack of vibrancy impeded my ability to find paying work in CL. However, i'm willing to agree that these problems exist. I do, however, think that comparing the work produced by the open source CL community to that produced by multi-billion dollar corporations is both unfair and counter-productive. Apple and Google have something to sell, and are aggressively attempting to sell it to both users and developers. Their /raison d'etre/ is to produce tools that are useful for the casual developer and used by the masses. The same can not be said of the Clozure team, the SBCL devs, the SLIME folk or us working slobs just trying to make a living using CL. If i had the resources of a mega-corporation behind me, do you think cliki would be held together with duct-tape and bubble gum, or common-lisp.net would look old and tired? Would the ALU wiki crash every few months and be generally a mess to work with? I'd like to think otherwise. The root of the perceived problem is a lack of resources, not a lack of effort or desire on the part of the "lisp community". There are many in the "lisp community" working to " IMPLEMENT stuff that is not just interesting to the Common Lisp community but to computer science in general", and there are plenty of folk playing with the CCL IDE, among others. A call to arms such as the OP's sounds to me more like an order to "work harder" rather then a productive solution or even a motivating idea. I suppose i am just tired of hearing, on every lisp forum everywhere, someone's ideas about what's wrong with CL and how the "lisp community" can work to fix it when "we're" already working as hard as we can just to keep things running. While my (private) reply was admittedly over-the-top rude, it was an emotional response to feeling as if i'd (we'd?) been shit on for my (our?) efforts. It's almost enough to make me want to take my toys and go home. Cheers, drewc

For a long time, I've been saying:

- The languages that have been vibrant and for which tools are flourishing are the ones that are (a) perceived as exciting, and/or (b) used by a large and/or growing community.  It's hard to make this happen for Common Lisp.

(Just for one example: consider why lisp.org still makes Lisp look like a dusty historical artifact, as compared with python.org or ruby.org.  The reasons for this are somewhat complicated and historical, but, for whatever reasons, the problem persists.)

- Nobody is paid to create better open-source Lisp programming environments.  Doing a good IDE is hard.  Even doing a Lisp plugin for Eclipse (which lets you share some of its existing mechanisms) is hard enough that the only one I know of is still pretty basic.  Even here at ITA where so many of us use Lisp, I don't think we have one person assigned to improve or supersede Slime.  We are trying get better code coverage checking so that we can improve our unit testing, but that's the only such thing going on that I am aware of.

- There is a lot of obsolete stuff in Common Lisp.  I and others have written about this at some length.  See http://ilc2009.scheming.org/node/7.

As for me, if the Google acquisition of ITA happens, chances are that I won't be allowed to use Common Lisp, and that it's unlikely that I'll ever have a chance to use it for a paid job ever again.  Not impossible, but unlikely. There are reasons for that.

So as much as we may agree with the problems you are talking about, it's very hard to solve them for real.

-- Dan

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Sam Steingold wrote on Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 04:16:10PM -0500:

I think Franz, Lispworks, ITA et al are vital parts of the "lisp community". I think the fact that none of them is paying anyone to maintain SLIME, ALU wiki, common-lisp.net &c is indicative of understandable but deplorable corporate myopia ("public goods cannot be produced by private businesses").

From my perspective SLIME just doesn't work well enough that I would have put some steam behind it.

Of course ilisp, which did work better for me, is now way too behind the times to be rescued. So I guess I'm stuck unless I want to go with Hemlock? Franz and Lispworks all have their own Emacs and CL editor, respectively. That might have to do with it :-) Martin -- Martin Cracauer, Programmer, ITA Software Inc, 617-714-2130

On 20 January 2011 13:16, Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Drew Crampsie <drewc@tech.coop> wrote:

...

The root of the perceived problem is a lack of resources, not a lack of effort or desire on the part of the "lisp community".

I think Franz, Lispworks, ITA et al are vital parts of the "lisp community". I think the fact that none of them is paying anyone to maintain SLIME, ALU wiki, common-lisp.net &c is indicative of understandable but deplorable corporate myopia ("public goods cannot be produced by private businesses").

To be fair, i've never asked for financial contributions from anyone, and perhaps that's something i should do. Perhaps a banner ad with my sad face ala wikipedia. I've got a small team of developers with experience doing web and systems apps in lisp, and we could be convinced to work for peanuts given the glory involved ;). In all seriousness, i think it's time i ask the community for some help before i get (more) jaded and apathetic. Cheers, drewc

-- Sam Steingold <http://sds.podval.org>