Re: Reddit Guys on the Pros and Cons of Lisp

Bill Atkins wrote:
> Seriously, though, what are all of these great libraries that Lispers
> are missing out on?
>
> Bill
>

If anybody actually wants to listen to newcomers, rather than ignoring
any hint of deficiency in their (admittedly awesome) favorite language,
here's a couple:

1. A community standard, cross-implementation tool to find and install
libraries, ala cpan or ruby-gems. asdf-install is close, but: A. lots
of authors dont use it and B. the sbcl version is (afaik) still not
merged with the portable version. The difference between 'gem install
rails' and, say, manually tracking down all of the dependencies needed
for the latest UCW is phenomenal.

2. A solid https / http client library that handles cookies. LWP is a
gateway drug for perl, and CL doesnt have anything that comes close.
trivial-http is too trivial. cl-curl is not asdf-installable, due to
(afaik) the author being dissatisfied with asdf-install as compared to
clc.

lest I be accused of merely whining, i would be happy to work on these
issues, given some indication of possible directions, eg.
#2 may be as straightforward as writing up a 'howto write web scrapers
using common lisp', which I may do if cl-curl ends up meeting my needs.
(last time I needed a scraper, I ended up writing it in python after
little success)
#1b is probably over my head, but I'd be happy to find out otherwise.
#1a . . . .? go about on CLiki making asdf-installable versions of
software where possible?

-cody

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Why do Python, Java and Perl have so many libraries and CL does not?
    ... > cl-xmpp is a Lisp implementation of the Jabber protocol the open ... I ported the particular library mentioned in this blog post to clisp ... If people are looking to whine about libraries that ought to be ... The tar on my system doesn't play nicely with the old asdf-install ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Installing libraries
    ... I have a totally different approach of managing lisp libraries. ... But that's not the major reason why I don't use asdf-install. ... it beats cl's build-in "loop" macro out of the water. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Installing libraries
    ... have compatibility issues with certain lisp implementations (especially ... But that's not the major reason why I don't use asdf-install. ... it beats cl's build-in "loop" macro out of the water. ... Rosenberg, Sven Van Caekenberghe, etc have produced tons of libraries ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • "Internal" packages in ASDF
    ... happens with internal libraries and libraries that are used by multiple ... An example is split-sequence, which is packaged up and distributed ... split-sequence later than you installed asdf-install, ... it seems that one might wish to permit loading multiple ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)