Re: Are we close to a Lisp boom ?
- From: Rainer Joswig <joswig@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 07 May 2008 20:43:33 +0200
In article
<53682fc0-b338-4804-be77-84f73a466f00@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Will Schenk <wschenk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 3, 12:21 pm, "Peter Hildebrandt" <peter.hildebra...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I believe the barrier to entry is too high here, and I think the major
reason is that the lisp world is so pluralistic: Which implementation do
I use? Which IDE? Which libraries? Where do I get what?
(Unfortunately) people expect there to be one way to do things, i.e. they
expect to go to lisp.org, "click here to download", double-click the
installer, select "example-1" and first launch, click "run", and look at
their first own weblog :-)
As a newcomer (I remember!) lisp is quite confusing: which implementation
to use? Where to download? Where is a good discussion board? What are
the libraries?
I was actually asking myself this question this weekend: I have a code
problem which for various reasons I need to break out into something
better than ruby. I need local performance specifically and I'd like
to make it distributable. (Something along the mapreduce model
probably.) I need fairly tight control over memory (at least I need
access to mmap() and ideally there's already a good btree
implementation that's fast). Event base concurrency would be nice.
(Also, it should go without saying that it supports sockets and
http.) I know java the best and it's performance quirks, so its a low
risk thing for me, but, ug. The ruby code makes extensive use of meta
programming, and for what I'm doing I expect to do a lot more. So
another reason to not go back to java. I've never used lisp but it
occurs to me that this is probably what the hubbub of macros is all
about.
I've been looking around and everything that's out there is either out
of date or lacking consensus. Developing on OSX and deploying on
gentoo linux. Everything is so fragmented and incompatible, I mean
"pluralistic", that its unclear. If I use Ready Lisp, will I be
committing to deploying on SBCL? Do I need to care about that?
It is good to ask here. You will get many different answers. ;-)
Then you still have to choose, but with more knowledge. ;-)
I want exactly the go to lisp.org and click download this. Ruby has
like 5 distros now, MRI, Rubinious, JRuby, IronRuby, some other thing
built on a smalltalk VM -- and when I see that many options, I don't
see choice. I see: In Someway, Every One Of These Choices Profoundly
Suck. I mean, diversity and variation are only positive when you are
talking about surface frivolities; core things are shared and remained
unchanged. There's not a lot of variation in mitochondrial dna.
Lisp seems cool, and I have a good reason now to actually check it out
with a real problem. What would you guys suggest to download and
install? Pls keep the caveats to the minimum.
Well, many who don't want to struggle (and have the money) use
a commercial version (LispWorks, Allegro CL, ...).
I would recommend both of them. IMHO both are excellent
platforms.
For those who don't have the money, like open source, or
have some other reasons there are a several choices with some tradeoffs.
SBCL: generally fast, largish, threads on some ports (Mac OS X)
are 'experimental', widely used. I would just check if it runs on
your platform and try it.
CMUCL: generally fast, largish (I use it on Mac OS X)
Clozure CL: mostly fast, slower FP code, fast compiler, smaller code
ECLS: recently gained more traction, good integration with C
(embeddable)
CLISP: a bit slower than some of the above, small code,
quite portable and very useful for scripting tasks
The IDE for those is usually SLIME/Emacs. The commercial
CL systems have better (IMHO) IDEs - you pay for that.
Plus there are some other options. Scieneer CL for example
might be useful when some performances requirements
would make multi-cpu machines necessary. Corman CL
runs under Windows and is useful, when you want to
write either Windows software or you want a 'cheap'
IDE under Windows. Some old-timers use MCL on Macs.
Some math packages run under GCL.
Dan Weinreb had a good recent overview:
http://common-lisp.net/~dlw/LispSurvey.html
Thanks.
-w
http://benchcoach.com
--
http://lispm.dyndns.org/
.
- References:
- Are we close to a Lisp boom ?
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- Re: Are we close to a Lisp boom ?
- From: Peter Hildebrandt
- Re: Are we close to a Lisp boom ?
- From: Will Schenk
- Are we close to a Lisp boom ?
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