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comment by forwardslash
forwardslash  ·  4203 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Lisp, the Universe and Everything: Free "Lisp Hackers" Ebook

I've started reading the interviews and they're pretty interesting. As I'm still getting my barrings in Lisp it's interesting to see how other people use Lisp. My one beef is that everyone so far seems to just gloss over what they dislike most about Lisp. I've found that once you start understanding something you find you have something you don't like about it, whether that be a preference or limitation. No language is perfect, and I love to rant about problems in languages that I none-the-less love to use.





user-inactivated  ·  4203 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The Lisp community is pretty defensive. It's widely respected, but not very widely used since the AI Winter, so there's this constant worry that the technology we all love is going to die out. I don't think it's likely, Lisp is ancient by computing standards and new people do pick it up all the time. I don't think the community is even that much smaller than it ever was, certainly not that much smaller than it's been since I've been around, it's just not much bigger either, and there are a lot more programmers now. But anyway, the perception is there, and people tend to circle the wagons and evangelize a little too vehemently.

But since you brought it up: Shared libraries. Everyone points out that C programs are huge too if you count all the libraries they link against as part of them, but no one statically links all their C libraries for a reason. Richard Gabriel pointed out that the common-lisp package (and any other locked package) could be made a shared library without contradicting the standard 20 years ago, but no one's done it yet because we're all fine with pretending we're using a Lisp Machine VM. Except for the people who constantly ask for tree shakers because they want to make executables like they do with every other language, and they don't want them to take ages to start (and don't want a cat clone that takes 70 megs of ram), and we patiently explain that tree shakers won't help because if the compiler has to be kept everything else does too, and if you're using CLOS you'll need to keep the compiler, and you're probably using CLOS even if you don't know you're using CLOS. Having common-lisp be a shared library would solve that problem, taking us a long way towards playing nicely with the rest of the Unix environment.