… as explained by Sir Kenny,
From: Ken Tilton
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:53:07 -0400
Subject: Re: Newbie FAQ #2: Where’s the GUI?
Jonathan Gardner wrote:
> I know this is a FAQ, but I still don’t have any answers, at least answers that I like.
That’s because you missed FAQ #1 (”Where are the damn libraries?”) and the [...]
The most famous piece of Lisp-related vaporware is vapor no longer: Arc has been released. After paging through the tutorial, I’m a bit underwhelmed. It looks like just a bunch of syntactic sugar implemented on top of Scheme. Clojure is more interesting and more innovative. Clojure and Arc have some things [...]
Dan Weinreb posted common Complaints About Common Lisp. My personal complaint is in there — the lack of libraries that are well-documented and regularly updated. I think it’s a critical mass problem: so few people are using Common Lisp in their day-to-day work that there’s not enough momentum to keep the libraries going [...]
A couple nights ago I walked down to LispNYC in the East Village to hear Rich Hickey talk about Clojure, his new Lisp-like language. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. Another Lisp? Ho hum. I’m sure it’s very clever and cool and all, but not something I can actually use.
Instead, [...]
From a 1995 paper on intentional programming: “Present day syntax had [sic] been predicated on a character stream that could have been input from punch cards, or teletypes.” Exactly! Why are we still working in a punch-card manner on million-pixel displays? Why are we still arguing about curly brackets versus parentheses when [...]
I’m certainly not the first to do this, but I felt like writing it. Comparing Ruby and Common Lisp:
Syntax: Advantage, Common Lisp. No contest here. Ruby’s syntax is ugly, with all those ends hanging around and the { |var| … } block syntax. The one thing Ruby has going for it [...]
I was at LispNYC last night listening to Anton van Straaten discuss his work on R6RS, the new Scheme standard. One surprising change from R5RS is that eval is defined in a library.
Eval, in a library? Holy scopes! The Common Lispers in the audience were aghast. Even the Schemers were a [...]
In one of my first posts, I asked “Why do we speak of programming languages instead of programming notation?” My thought was, and still is, that code in any existing programming language is just one possible representation of an abstract computational process. Higher-level languages like Lisp are good because they bring the written [...]
I like Lisp’s prefix syntax. It’s consistent, has natural structure, and makes code-manipulation macros possible. But it’s not always the easiest to read or write. For example, I often want to apply several successive transformations to the same chunk of text. In Perl, I could use the default variable $_ and [...]
Well, a new year, and (finally) a new post. In the past two weeks I have undertaken a complete rewrite of Project Posner from Common Lisp to Ruby on Rails. Now, before the Lispniks descend upon me with their sharp parenthetical barbs, allow me to explain. The Common Lisp version was never [...]