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Common Lisp homepage

lisp-lang.org

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Re: Common Lisp homepage

#291

Post by nickpsecurity »

jabl wrote: post #282
deepaksurti wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the fewer CL programmers will run circles around P, F, C programmers :-)

So, why don't they? ;) Why is viaweb and ITA trotted out decade after decade? If CL is so awesome why isn't the world filled with awesome stuff implemented in CL? (To be clear, IMHO it's a huge shame that more powerful languages like CL or Haskell aren't more popular)

Because they won't put in the effort to just pull up and post the customer lists of companies selling LISP commercially. ;)

http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html

https://franz.com/success/

The companies that use LISP don't talk about it much. I'm not saying secret weapon or anything either. I'm saying they seem to be among the set that just identifies something good for the business, buys/builds it, and solves business problems. They don't write articles about their programming language. What I will say is the small number of case studies on those two companies have much more interesting software than what's advertised for many stacks. The kinds of things people use it for corroborates the LISP advocates' claim it's a favorite for hardest, constantly-changing problems. It's more remarkable with Allegro since they charge royalties on top of the licensing with customers still buying their stuff.

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#292

Post by vram22 »

kamaal wrote: post #248
vram22 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't have the link handy, but I think I read somewhere that someone calculated the number of characters or punctation (things like parens vs. braces, etc.) for some code using Lisp vs. C-style languages, and showed that (at least for some examples), Lisp code actually took less characters (or punctuation) in total.

Another factor could be familiarity, by now people are so used to seeing C like syntax, any things else would feel automatically difficult attracting huge investments in time to learn. Also if most developers have to learn lisp, there have to be enough jobs.

Right, good point. Sort of a chicken-or-egg situation.

Also, this reminds me of Paul Graham's famous essay, Beating the Averages [1], about why and how he and his co-founders used Lisp at their startup Viaweb, which was later acquired by Yahoo! for ~40 million USD, IIRC.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/avg.html

I think it was this essay, along with his other one about the first summer school for founders (which later became Y Combinator), that attracted the attention of a lot of developers (some of whom later became successful YC applicants) and helped both YC and HN take off.

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#293

Post by vram22 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #291
jabl wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, why don't they? ;) Why is viaweb and ITA trotted out decade after decade? If CL is so awesome why isn't the world filled with awesome stuff implemented in CL? (To be clear, IMHO it's a huge shame that more powerful languages like CL or Haskell aren't more popular)

Because they won't put in the effort to just pull up and post the customer lists of companies selling LISP commercially. ;) http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html https://franz.com/success/ The companies that use LISP don't talk about it much. I'm not saying secret weapon or anything either. I'm saying they seem to be among the set that just identifies something good for the business, buys/builds it, and…

Interesting points.

>It's more remarkable with Allegro since they charge royalties on top of the licensing with customers still buying their stuff.

Do you mean that (apart from the licensing) they also charge a percentage of the revenue or profits that their customers make from products they develop using Allegro's products?

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#294

Post by e12e »

lispm wrote: post #290
e12e wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wasn't part of the platform tooling I think lisp did (to a lesser extent still do) suffer from the "whole system syndrome" that also affected Smalltalk; I'm still not sure that I'd find it comfortable to marry small lisp programs with a shell pipeline, or convenient to work with sockets, files or even databases in a familiar way from within common lisp. Nor would i know how to easily share such code (although quick…

> I think lisp did (to a lesser extent still do) suffer from the "whole system syndrome There are a bunch of problems of Lisp for systems/application programming: * dynamic typing and dealing with runtime errors * garbage collection vs. real-time response * amount of memory used is usually higher for GCed systems * interoperability with C code and code in other languages * abstraction mismatch between C code and Lisp…

I was rather excited a while back when discovered iso lisp/ standard lisp/EU lisp. A few newer than common lisp standards that tried to extract a sane subset of clos and some other cl features (but trying to avoid cruft and overlapping functionality). Unfortunately, there didn't appear to be many viable implementations; one French one that was commercially licensed, and. Not much else that I found at a time.

But it looked a lot like the good parts of cl (pragmatic standard) with the good parts of scheme (small, but not minimal).

At least on paper. I guess the fact that there's a lot of viable cl systems and not really any iso lisp systems is telling...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISLISP

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#295

Post by FractalLP »

lispm wrote: post #272
FractalLP wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough argument here, although you could probably still argue that it is easier to setup most of those languages than use emacs. That's a non-starter for a lot of devs who aren't open to the long-term benefits.

True. You probably mean GNU Emacs and (not so popular right now) XEmacs. Even I usually prefer to use other Emacs variants for Lisp programming: Fred, Zmacs, LispWorks, CCL, ... I prefer embedded Emacs variants which are written in Common Lisp. With Lisps without embedded Emacs variants, usually GNU Emacs / SLIME is the best option. I can understand that this is for people used to other editors (like Eclipse, Intelli…

Yea, I was talking about GNU Emacs + Slime. I'm with y'all that Lisp is an extremely powerful and frankly astonishing piece of engineering. It just seems to cater more to those on the fringes and those willing to put in the work to achieve enlightenment.

I've read a few Lisp books and have written a bit of Lisp code and understand code is data is code, but haven't put in enough time to really reap the rewards. I think my above posts were taken as an insult to the language rather than some observations over several years of playing in the community. One day I hope to join your ranks, but most of my current needs involve needing lots of built in language constructs for data analysis and scientific needs.

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#296

Post by lispm »

e12e wrote: post #294
lispm wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think lisp did (to a lesser extent still do) suffer from the "whole system syndrome There are a bunch of problems of Lisp for systems/application programming: * dynamic typing and dealing with runtime errors * garbage collection vs. real-time response * amount of memory used is usually higher for GCed systems * interoperability with C code and code in other languages * abstraction mismatch between C code and Lisp…

I was rather excited a while back when discovered iso lisp/ standard lisp/EU lisp. A few newer than common lisp standards that tried to extract a sane subset of clos and some other cl features (but trying to avoid cruft and overlapping functionality). Unfortunately, there didn't appear to be many viable implementations; one French one that was commercially licensed, and. Not much else that I found at a time. But it l…

ISLISP was defined/implemented mostly outside of the US (exception, Kent Pitman, IIRC) and mostly by work from Europe&Japan. But that funding dried up long ago. One of its purposes was to have a Lisp standard outside of the USA, not controlled by US standards bodies and US vendors/users.

It's too much like Common Lisp and the standard itself is not bringing exciting stuff. It's nice in itself, but not really needed.

Can't remember anything in the language which really addresses the delivery topic - though I've never read the spec in depth.

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#297

Post by lispm »

FractalLP wrote: post #295
lispm wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. You probably mean GNU Emacs and (not so popular right now) XEmacs. Even I usually prefer to use other Emacs variants for Lisp programming: Fred, Zmacs, LispWorks, CCL, ... I prefer embedded Emacs variants which are written in Common Lisp. With Lisps without embedded Emacs variants, usually GNU Emacs / SLIME is the best option. I can understand that this is for people used to other editors (like Eclipse, Intelli…

Yea, I was talking about GNU Emacs + Slime. I'm with y'all that Lisp is an extremely powerful and frankly astonishing piece of engineering. It just seems to cater more to those on the fringes and those willing to put in the work to achieve enlightenment. I've read a few Lisp books and have written a bit of Lisp code and understand code is data is code, but haven't put in enough time to really reap the rewards. I thin…

No, I think such observations are valid. I mainly tried to add that even for me, a long time Lisp user, GNU Emacs / SLIME is not the primary tool. There are a few groups and a large and visible group is using SBCL + GNU Emacs + SLIME. But there are other groups.

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#298

Post by nickpsecurity »

vram22 wrote: post #293
nickpsecurity wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they won't put in the effort to just pull up and post the customer lists of companies selling LISP commercially. ;) http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html https://franz.com/success/ The companies that use LISP don't talk about it much. I'm not saying secret weapon or anything either. I'm saying they seem to be among the set that just identifies something good for the business, buys/builds it, and…

Interesting points. >It's more remarkable with Allegro since they charge royalties on top of the licensing with customers still buying their stuff. Do you mean that (apart from the licensing) they also charge a percentage of the revenue or profits that their customers make from products they develop using Allegro's products?

It looks a bit different than the last description i saw. Here's current offering:

https://franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml

They aint cheap or simple with the licensing. People still are buying it, though.

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#299

Post by [deleted] »

FractalLP wrote: post #295
lispm wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. You probably mean GNU Emacs and (not so popular right now) XEmacs. Even I usually prefer to use other Emacs variants for Lisp programming: Fred, Zmacs, LispWorks, CCL, ... I prefer embedded Emacs variants which are written in Common Lisp. With Lisps without embedded Emacs variants, usually GNU Emacs / SLIME is the best option. I can understand that this is for people used to other editors (like Eclipse, Intelli…

Yea, I was talking about GNU Emacs + Slime. I'm with y'all that Lisp is an extremely powerful and frankly astonishing piece of engineering. It just seems to cater more to those on the fringes and those willing to put in the work to achieve enlightenment. I've read a few Lisp books and have written a bit of Lisp code and understand code is data is code, but haven't put in enough time to really reap the rewards. I thin…

[deleted]

Re: Common Lisp homepage

#300

Post by vram22 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #298
vram22 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting points. >It's more remarkable with Allegro since they charge royalties on top of the licensing with customers still buying their stuff. Do you mean that (apart from the licensing) they also charge a percentage of the revenue or profits that their customers make from products they develop using Allegro's products?

It looks a bit different than the last description i saw. Here's current offering: https://franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml They aint cheap or simple with the licensing. People still are buying it, though.

Good info, thanks.
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