Oh, god. Not again. Stopped reading at "More Object-Oriented".
CL21: An experimental project redesigning Common Lisp
11–20 of 102 posts
Re: CL21: An experimental project redesigning Common Lisp
#12One of the things I don't like about Common Lisp is the unusual names. Just on the basis of the linked page, CL21 doesn't fix that. Take princ #"Hello, ${name}\n". Why not just use print like the rest of the programming world. Okay, some languages use writeln, etc. But princ? Why not print? A little further down, we see while-let1. Why the number? If you want to call it "Common Lisp in the 21st Century" you need to c…
Honestly? Mostly because Lisp conventions predate "the rest of the programming world". As for while-let1, it's a while-let with just one variable binding (I guess I'd prefer them to stick with just while-let). There's usually a very good reason behind all those "unusual names" of Common Lisp. I don't think that dumbing things up so that they look more similar to everything else in a language that is already different…
Things that made perfect sense in the 1970s, are not set in stone for all time.
Re: CL21: An experimental project redesigning Common Lisp
#13This looks cool enough but it would need a big community to really change the common lisp landscape (in my opinion). I wonder how the lazy sequence support stacks up to Clojure, Haskell, etc. support. One difficulty with promoting a more modern layer to common lisp is that Clojure is already such a productive and practical language. I have written a few common lisp books, and remain a fan of the language, and an upgr…
I am curious to hear the opinions of the heavy hitters in the common lisp world.
In this case, theirs isn't the opinion that counts.
Re: CL21: An experimental project redesigning Common Lisp
#14As a former common lisper, I don't see the point. Clojure is better in pretty much every respect and incorporates many fresh ideas (such as excellent concurrency support). Syntax is the least of CL's limitations. I didn't switch to Clojure because it was "easy" (quite the contrary).
And no, I do not miss reader macros. Perhaps more surprisingly, I don't miss CLOS at all, much as I always admired its design. It's just... Unnecessary.
What I do enjoy is STM, good performance, Java interop, ClojureScript, core.async and lots of excellent code with fresh ideas popping up all over the landscape.
Re: CL21: An experimental project redesigning Common Lisp
#15One of the things I don't like about Common Lisp is the unusual names. Just on the basis of the linked page, CL21 doesn't fix that. Take princ #"Hello, ${name}\n". Why not just use print like the rest of the programming world. Okay, some languages use writeln, etc. But princ? Why not print? A little further down, we see while-let1. Why the number? If you want to call it "Common Lisp in the 21st Century" you need to c…
As odd as it may seem, I ended up prefering car/cdr over anything else (except when access to pattern matching and destructuring). I know first/rest, head/tail or even fst/snd are clearer names, but car/cdr ended up as symbols having precisely this meaning in LISP idioms (recursion over cons-cell based lists).
My 1.5cents
Re: CL21: An experimental project redesigning Common Lisp
#16One of the things I don't like about Common Lisp is the unusual names. Just on the basis of the linked page, CL21 doesn't fix that. Take princ #"Hello, ${name}\n". Why not just use print like the rest of the programming world. Okay, some languages use writeln, etc. But princ? Why not print? A little further down, we see while-let1. Why the number? If you want to call it "Common Lisp in the 21st Century" you need to c…
As odd as it may seem, I ended up prefering car/cdr over anything else (except when access to pattern matching and destructuring). I know first/rest, head/tail or even fst/snd are clearer names, but car/cdr ended up as symbols having precisely this meaning in LISP idioms (recursion over cons-cell based lists). My 1.5cents
car/cdr also enables things like caar/cadr, which I personally find much clearer than "headHead" or "headOfHead".
Re: CL21: An experimental project redesigning Common Lisp
#17Inb4 the newLISP cultists arrive.
Re: CL21: An experimental project redesigning Common Lisp
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly? Mostly because Lisp conventions predate "the rest of the programming world". As for while-let1, it's a while-let with just one variable binding (I guess I'd prefer them to stick with just while-let). There's usually a very good reason behind all those "unusual names" of Common Lisp. I don't think that dumbing things up so that they look more similar to everything else in a language that is already different…
I do. There is a reason for the success of Ruby and Python, and why Elixir is dragging Erlang in to the present. It turns out you don't just have to write your language in the shape of the machine/vm but it can be a tool conformed to the mind of the programmer. "princ" is not easy to remember, read or associate to other things one already knows. The point of a project like this should not be to save old school progra…
I don't know German, but I have a huntch that Romanian, my native language, is more complex than German, except that Romanian has firm roots in latin, therefore more people unfamiliar with both will have an easier time with Romanian, since we have a significant portion of our vocabulary similar to Italian or Spanish, plus we borrowed words from French, along with many neologisms coming straight from English. Just because a language is unfamiliar, that does not make it hard or complex, just because you're not speaking it.
Consequently, just because a language seems superficially familiar, that doesn't make it easy to learn - for programming languages it takes weeks to understand the basic necessities, whereas it takes years to become a master, regardless of the programming language you're talking about.
Also, Erlang's Prolog-like syntax sucks, not because it's unfamiliar, but because it objectively sucks.
Re: CL21: An experimental project redesigning Common Lisp
#19By the way, looking at the github there are 40 open issues 5 open pull requests and no changes to master for 6 months. I think this project may be dead, or at least on hold for the time being.
It looks like they are using the issues to keep track of feature requests.
Re: CL21: An experimental project redesigning Common Lisp
#20I think this is an okay idea, but the comparison to Clojure is really lacking. Why build on CL when you can build on Clojure? I get the inter-operability, but when Multi-Threading and Multi-Processing is listed under Deferred, Clojure could provide so much of that for free. On Clojure, etc.