Re: How does ILisp/HyperSpec work, and a general observation about Lisp culture

From: Daniel Barlow (dan_at_telent.net)
Date: 11/06/03 

Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 16:01:27 +0000

rif <rif@mit.edu> writes:

> If this were totally isolated, that would be one thing, but this has
> been fairly typical of my experience with CL tools. There's often

Did you report it to the ILISP mailing list? I've found them to be
pretty good about applying bugfix patches (perhaps less good about
releasing new versions, but that's hardly something I can claim to be
any better at ;-)

> some little flub that takes a long time to track down, and when you
> track it down, people say, "Oh, yeah, I remember that. You have to go
> into the code and change this line. That's what I did when I had this
> problem," which is better than nothing, but my experience with other
> languages has been that the tools have a greater tendency to Just
> Work.

I just spent the last three days arguing with Linux USB hotplug
support, on the basis that cirCLe Cd suers might want the option to
save their files somewhere more permanent than a ramdisk. The
standard of "Just Work" there is "you can give us a shell script and
we'll run it when a new device is added". Determining anything
further, such as the new mountable devices that are now available
(some devices are partitioned, some are not, some incorrectly claim to
be, some you don't know either way until the user actually inserts
media in the device) is pretty much left to the user. On top of the
bugs either in my kernel or bios or the particular devices I'm testing
with, this was a pretty unrewarding experience.

I'm not trying to defend the new-user-friendliness of Lisp, but don't
go thinking this is unique to the CL community. jwz summed it up
pretty well: "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing"

-dan 

-- 
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