Discussion on /r/lisp, yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/4j6v8y/lisplangorg_a_...
(Lack of) discussion here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11691086
New Common Lisp website
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: New Common Lisp website
#22Can someone explain to me the main differences between a language like Common Lisp and Haskell? I'm planning on learning on a purely functional language this year and I've narrowed it down to Haskell and CL but I don't know which to pick. Haskell has sort of been winning due to my friends knowing it and using it. If you have any resources as well, please let me know. I don't know if this is the right place to post th…
Common Lisp is functional in the sense of being based on Lambda calculus, but with all sorts of imperative and OO things bolted on.
Haskell is functional in the sense most people think (maths 'n things, functions with no side effects), with a few 'outs' (monads or 'containers' for doing imperative-like things).
If you want a 'functional' language, choose Haskell. If you want a language you can bend to your will, where you'll be making your own abstractions, writing a DSL, etc..., choose Common Lisp. Actually Haskell isn't even bad for that, so if your friends are using Haskell, just try that.
Re: New Common Lisp website
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? They're just being honest about it. It's a large spec and it surely isn't that easy to convert it to a more modern format.
Put up a pdf (if you have TeX you can get a pdf), but don't make some technical argument that makes you sound slow. This is marketing not a technical talk.
IIRC the legal situation of the hyperspec is a bit weird and converting to other formats could be problematic. (Perhaps someone else may be more precise)
Re: New Common Lisp website
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Put up a pdf (if you have TeX you can get a pdf), but don't make some technical argument that makes you sound slow. This is marketing not a technical talk.
IIRC the legal situation of the hyperspec is a bit weird and converting to other formats could be problematic. (Perhaps someone else may be more precise)
The HyperSpec is under LispWorks' copyright. The official ANSI document is copyrighted. The TeX sources of the spec, however, are fair game.
Re: New Common Lisp website
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Put up a pdf (if you have TeX you can get a pdf), but don't make some technical argument that makes you sound slow. This is marketing not a technical talk.
The CLHS[1] they mentioned has been available online for ages. What they're talking about is making a more modern site. Generating a PDF from the spec wouldn't get them any closer to that goal. [1]: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index...
Then don't put a specification link on the home page and wait until it is done. The text is non-helpful to marketing the language particularly when books are actually available and linkable that can be read now.
Re: New Common Lisp website
#26Click specification: "We're currently working on parsing the TeX sources of the specification to generate a more modern version of the CLHS. This might take a while." Yeah, that's probably not the message you want to send after all the virtues (e.g. speed) listed on the first page.
It's an extremely large language, with most of the things that are normally availible as libraries, defined as part of the language itself. So of course the conversion is going to take a while, especially if the input data isn't very well formatted.
I don't really see how difficulty porting document sets to a nicer format translates into "This language isn't/doesn't foo", since that's more human error than the fault of the language itself.
Re: New Common Lisp website
#27I hate the current trend for websites to have about a page's worth of information spread over about eight pages' worth of space. I'm used to seeing it on startup websites, where it doesn't bother me so much because I expect those to be trendy. But I'm recently seeing it infect websites of old school geek projects that I feel should know better. This is one example and the new emacs website a few days ago was another.
I'll allow it. Lisp in general (and Common Lisp in particular) desperately needs better marketing, which unfortunately is susceptible to the vagaries of fashion. If dressing it up a little makes it more attractive to the next generation, then mission accomplished.
Sorry, but a "website" which is basically a set of powerpoint slides in Javascript is certainly not going to help "market" anything.
And to add insult to the injury, when you actually suffer through those empty marketing slogans, you get down to a big link "Start here" - which unveils a link to few very basic tutorials.
What exactly is the point of such "website"? The information value of this is zero. What a waste of time.
A much better (but not the latest web framework buzzword compliant) resource is this: http://www.lisperati.com/
Re: New Common Lisp website
#28I hate the current trend for websites to have about a page's worth of information spread over about eight pages' worth of space. I'm used to seeing it on startup websites, where it doesn't bother me so much because I expect those to be trendy. But I'm recently seeing it infect websites of old school geek projects that I feel should know better. This is one example and the new emacs website a few days ago was another.
Have a loook at http://cliki.net/ it's where the real information is.
Re: New Common Lisp website
#29I love common lisp. That being said, i feel like this effort might be better spent contributing to modernizing and cleaning up / updating the existing community sites like cliki.net.
Out of curiosity, what would you like to see updated on cliki.net? I wrote cliki2 with Andrey Moskvitin so a lot of the changes from the first cliki ended up being our opinions.
Re: New Common Lisp website
#30Can someone explain to me the main differences between a language like Common Lisp and Haskell? I'm planning on learning on a purely functional language this year and I've narrowed it down to Haskell and CL but I don't know which to pick. Haskell has sort of been winning due to my friends knowing it and using it. If you have any resources as well, please let me know. I don't know if this is the right place to post th…
As others have mentioned, CL is not a pure functional language like Haskell.
However it is possible in CL to write parts of many programs in a functional style. Further, my functional collections library, FSet [0], greatly expands the amount of code that can be written this way, bringing CL much closer to being a functional language. One FSet user told me that it had changed the way he thinks about programming in CL -- which I think reflects an intellectual transition that is at least a good part of the transition one would hope to make by learning Haskell.
If you do go with CL, you might want to check it out. (It's in Quicklisp as "fset".)