Re: Reddit Guys on the Pros and Cons of Lisp

The lack of libraries argument is vaguely bogus. What libraries in
particular do they need that aren't already available? There exist
Common Lisp libraries for the most common application areas (database
interfaces, networking, bioinformatics, web servers, XML processing,
etc. plus a few neat libraries that most other languages couldn't even
think about having (CL-WHO, UCW, iterate)). For sure there aren't as
many libraries for Common Lisp as there are for, say, Perl, but take
advantage of interactive development and write them yourself.

Seriously, though, what are all of these great libraries that Lispers
are missing out on?

Bill

Adam Connor wrote:
> From
> http://www.davidnewberger.com/wp/2005/11/28/if-you-havent-reddit-you-are-missing-out/
>
> as seen on Planet Lisp:
>
> "In the pros department: it's a great programming language. Ruby,
> python, perl, java can't really compete as languages. HTML and
> symbolic expressions are almost a one-to-one mapping, so generating
> HTML is a breeze. It's great fun to work in, and I've certainly
> learned a good deal about programming in general just for using it.
>
> "Having a Lisp process I can manipulate on a live server has been very
> handy for updating small changes and debugging as well.
>
> "The drawbacks all basically stem from the same problem. Since very
> few people actually use Lisp, we can't take advantage of the
> tremendous community support the other languages have. There are few
> libraries, few implementations, and little real-world examples of
> building large-scale websites in Lisp. The language itself (ANSI
> Common Lisp) hasn't changed much since it was standardized, which was
> about 20 years ago.
>
> "I don't regret writing reddit in Lisp at all. It's a particularly
> good language for developing applications without a solid plan of
> where you're going. Lisp never gets in the programmer's way. However,
> sometimes (oftentimes, more like it) the environment does (again, lack
> of a strong community). We may rewrite reddit in something else as we
> bring on more programmers, but Lisp has certainly served as well up
> until this point."
>
> I suspect the drawbacks have a lot to do with scaring bigger
> organizations away from Lisp.
> --
> adamnospamaustin.rr.com
> s/nospam/c\./

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Program compression
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  • Re: To the Challenge question and a quick application from a J2EE guy
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