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Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

sbcl.org

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Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#21

Post by rjsw »

epolanski wrote: post #18
baq wrote: post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

Lisp's been around for 70 years at this point and hordes of developers tried it and said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work. I'm strongly convinced, having used Scheme, CL, Racket, Clojure that Lisp is doomed to be (mostly) a hobby language. The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet a…

I use Common Lisp at work.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#22

Post by oumua_don17 »

epolanski wrote: post #18
baq wrote: post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

Lisp's been around for 70 years at this point and hordes of developers tried it and said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work. I'm strongly convinced, having used Scheme, CL, Racket, Clojure that Lisp is doomed to be (mostly) a hobby language. The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet a…

>> said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work.

Says who, you? Wrong. I use Common Lisp at work.

edit: and not just use as in a side toy, design and writing software in CL is my primary responsibility. FWIW, at a FAANG!

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#23

Post by ivxvm »

GalaxyNova wrote: post #7
NeutralForest wrote: post #5

Great to see the project is still going strong, I kinda want to try CL but I always feel like I don't have a great use-case.

CL can be used pretty much anywhere nowadays, even on the web with ECL wasm compilation.

Anywhere is where exactly? I've been thinking of where I could use it for like 10 minutes, and I couldn't come up with anything. Maybe a game engine or web services. It wouldn't make much sense for any kind of desktop software or command line utilities that are supposed to start really fast and have minimal runtime.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#24

Post by WillAdams »

baq wrote: post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

That (deployment is via a customized image) is the thing I find most awkward.

Somewhere, I have a copy of a commercial LISP for Windows which would compile to an executable --- apparently this sort of thing is still possible, but it's not widely known/used, and sadly Jean-Marie Hullot's "SOS Interface" for the Mac was co-opted to NeXTstep:

https://denninginstitute.com/itcore/userinterface/GUIHistory...

I'd dearly love to see a RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool using LISP w/ a nifty UI for working up a GUI which would compile to something easily deployed (maybe HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript) as a stand-alone/single-file web application?

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#25

Post by michaelmrose »

epolanski wrote: post #18
baq wrote: post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

Lisp's been around for 70 years at this point and hordes of developers tried it and said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work. I'm strongly convinced, having used Scheme, CL, Racket, Clojure that Lisp is doomed to be (mostly) a hobby language. The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet a…

> The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet another DSL invented by the next developer next to them.

Have you like looked at anything in the Clojure ecosystem because this description makes no sense of any kind. Clojure has macros but less powerful than common lisp and Clojure code in the ecosystem tends to be small and understandable.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#26

Post by stackghost »

oumua_don17 wrote: post #22
epolanski wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lisp's been around for 70 years at this point and hordes of developers tried it and said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work. I'm strongly convinced, having used Scheme, CL, Racket, Clojure that Lisp is doomed to be (mostly) a hobby language. The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet a…

>> said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work. Says who, you? Wrong. I use Common Lisp at work. edit: and not just use as in a side toy, design and writing software in CL is my primary responsibility. FWIW, at a FAANG!

>FWIW, at a FAANG!

Do you work on ITA? Only FAANG I'm aware of using Lisp is Google.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#27

Post by amboo7 »

rjsw wrote: post #21
epolanski wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lisp's been around for 70 years at this point and hordes of developers tried it and said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work. I'm strongly convinced, having used Scheme, CL, Racket, Clojure that Lisp is doomed to be (mostly) a hobby language. The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet a…

I use Common Lisp at work.

Me too

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#28

Post by Shorel »

baq wrote: post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

Not that different.

AWS already has lots of AMI and docker are essentially image based.

We would version whole images in something like git, and that's all.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#29

Post by brabel »

WillAdams wrote: post #24
baq wrote: post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

That (deployment is via a customized image) is the thing I find most awkward. Somewhere, I have a copy of a commercial LISP for Windows which would compile to an executable --- apparently this sort of thing is still possible, but it's not widely known/used, and sadly Jean-Marie Hullot's "SOS Interface" for the Mac was co-opted to NeXTstep: https://denninginstitute.com/itcore/userinterface/GUIHistory... I'd dearly lov…

You probably want Clog: https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#30

Post by vincent-manis »

epolanski wrote: post #18
baq wrote: post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

Lisp's been around for 70 years at this point and hordes of developers tried it and said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work. I'm strongly convinced, having used Scheme, CL, Racket, Clojure that Lisp is doomed to be (mostly) a hobby language. The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet a…

I disagree with this profoundly. There is no argument that Lisp in general can get you in a terrible mess. So can C, or pretty much any language (I well remember a case of 11-way multiple inheritance in C++ game code). If I were running a Lisp-based project, there would be project standards (like no exported macros without signoff, and a list of standard library dependencies), documentation requirements, and code review.

The fact that Lisp is the “programmable programming language” doesn't mean that every engineer should be inventing weird versions of while loops. What it does mean is that a skilled Lisp programmer can build a domain-specific language that substantially helps in development.

One good example of this is the Crash Bandicoot games, along with the same studio's Jax and Daxter, which were built with dialects of Lisp (yes, they had to compile the code, and take care with storage allocation, just like any other game code). Cisco hired Kent Dybvig, principal author of the Chez Scheme system, and open-sourced that software; I have no clue what they use it for, to be honest, but I assume that they had some reason for doing this. Companies using various Lisp languages have been documented in areas from fintech to quantum computing.

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