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In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

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Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#101

Post by Annatar »

mepian wrote: post #37
Annatar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it can easily solve or altogether eschew a lot of the issues that object-oriented JavaScript developers are struggling with and that's barely scraping the tip of the iceberg of problems which Lisp doesn't suffer from. Alas one of the problems Lisp does quite acutely suffer from is that SBCL has become a defacto standard and its support for anything that isn't GNU/Linux (like Solaris / illumos) is dismal.

SBCL is open source, so you are free to improve the support for Solaris.

I would if I knew how; it sure wasn't for lack of my trying to do so, but I don't know enough to pull it off.

By the way expecting that something be fixed by a non-specialist just because something is open source and expecting someone to sink their extremely valuable free time so someone could break and destroy that work again, well, that's not only despicable, it's extremely infuriating.

All the more infuriating as SBCL wouldn't exist without Solaris, which means someone already broke it at least once and here you come expecting me to not only know what to fix, but invest my life into something where my effort would likely be broken upstream again.

This needs to be taken up by the core SBCL team. Meanwhile, pity the time I used to report bugs which just sit there unhandled.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#102

Post by Annatar »

_ph_ wrote: post #72
Annatar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it can easily solve or altogether eschew a lot of the issues that object-oriented JavaScript developers are struggling with and that's barely scraping the tip of the iceberg of problems which Lisp doesn't suffer from. Alas one of the problems Lisp does quite acutely suffer from is that SBCL has become a defacto standard and its support for anything that isn't GNU/Linux (like Solaris / illumos) is dismal.

I have run a server software written in SBCL on Solaris for many years. In which sense is the Solaris support lacking?

SBCL goes straight into a debugger on i86pc and on sparc it just core dumps immediately.

It cannot be built from source on either of those platforms.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#103

Post by Annatar »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #67
mepian wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SBCL is open source, so you are free to improve the support for Solaris.

Also, the SBCL maintainers can be hired for custom help or support - one of my customers did this, with good results.

I'm a private person in this capacity, so paying someone to reverse the breakage is out of the question. It's an outrage that something like that was allowed to happen in the first place. If this were my software, not only would I fix it immediately, but I would be deeply ashamed of myself for allowing it to happen. We as programmers should start taking responsibility for our actions.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#104

Post by hajile »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #65
ilikehurdles wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lisp was a lot less web friendly then than it is now, especially compared to those languages.

When Alexis Ohanian gave a talk at Google in 2013 I asked him afterwards about converting Reddit from Common Lisp to Python. He said the Common Lisp version crashed too often. He even made a funny comment about this when he autographed Without Their Permission for me. I agree with you, the web apps in CL story is much better now. I am biased, now that I am mostly retired most of my fun side projects are in CL (with H…

I doubt crashing had anything to do with lisp -- the site crashes hard at least once every week.

It was all about logistics. YC had two competing companies. They pushed them together. The lisp team could get up to speed on python faster than the python team could on common lisp.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#105

Post by commandlinefan »

xrd wrote: post #87
srean wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are people coming from nontraditional backgrounds into technical roles, and they, I assert, probably want a different book than the types of books O'Reilly generally publishes. ... and "the for Dummies" does not cater to them ? Or are you saying that O'Reilly should become somewhat more like the "Dummies" Series. Regardless of the name some of those books dont speak to the reader as if the reader is a dummy.…

I hate the dummies books too. People that consider themselves intelligent don't want to buy a book that forces you to call yourself a dummy. I'm saying there is another space for people that feel they are intelligent and don't yet have the knowledge about programming and could do it given the right introductions. O'Reilly speaks to me too, but I think there is entire population of people that aren't familiar with Tim…

> call yourself a dummy

I always put masking tape over the “dummies” part and write “geniuses” on it before I display it on my desk so nobody will know.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#106

Post by andrewflnr »

kirubakaran wrote: post #91
Waterluvian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no it's not just you. I get this kind of thing from the HN community now and then too. I once got chewed out for not knowing who Paul Graham is.

This might catch you up a little bit :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60357

Nice. This is my favorite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60503

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#107

Post by rjsw »

Annatar wrote: post #101
mepian wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SBCL is open source, so you are free to improve the support for Solaris.

I would if I knew how; it sure wasn't for lack of my trying to do so, but I don't know enough to pull it off. By the way expecting that something be fixed by a non-specialist just because something is open source and expecting someone to sink their extremely valuable free time so someone could break and destroy that work again, well, that's not only despicable, it's extremely infuriating. All the more infuriating as…

If none of the core SBCL team use Solaris then they won't know that SBCL doesn't work on it.

I'm sure that people will suggest things to try if you post details of what you have done to get it to build. Leave out words like "despicable" though.

Your account info states that you want to work with the Solaris successor projects, debugging a complex application is a good way to learn more about an OS.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#108

Post by Waterluvian »

kazinator wrote: post #94
Waterluvian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no it's not just you. I get this kind of thing from the HN community now and then too. I once got chewed out for not knowing who Paul Graham is.

You'd probably get chewed out on Facebook for not knowing who is Mark Zuckerberg.

The concept of needing to know the key figures behind each website you use is detached so far from the reality of being a human in the 21st century.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#109

Post by p_l »

eddieh wrote: post #90
xrd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the dummies books too. People that consider themselves intelligent don't want to buy a book that forces you to call yourself a dummy. I'm saying there is another space for people that feel they are intelligent and don't yet have the knowledge about programming and could do it given the right introductions. O'Reilly speaks to me too, but I think there is entire population of people that aren't familiar with Tim…

I think you're right about this. I'd much rather read LISP for Poets or LISP for Future Presidents than something with a title that is insulting or degrading. There's probably a considerable market for books that educate and respect the reader.

The old "For Dummies" books were very respectful if used self-deprecating humour on authors side often. The polish term used to translate "For Dummies" was a bit better IMO, though not exactly translateable.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#110

Post by emit_time »

Thiez wrote: post #79
emit_time wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the second programming language to have existed, and it is still used for some applications. It has some unique properties, including _code is data_. It is a functional language, and functional programming is making a comeback as well. There's a lot to it. I work at a company that used common lisp all the way down.

Is lisp really more functional than, say, Rust? I've tried it for a while but find Haskell much more pleasant to work with.

I'm not saying it's more functional than another language, also depends on the dialect of lisp.

In general though, lisp is a functional language.

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