Questions for 2017 Common Lisp experts

#commonlisp #lisp

anticrisis poses some good questions in a open way for the Common Lisp experts; the answers for this questions are in reddit, and are really good, if You, as I, loves Lisp or are interested in this great programming language go ahead and read the full answers here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/6snw5d/questions_for_2017_common_lisp_experts/

Here is a bit of the answers:

"Why aren’t ASDF dependencies automatically fetched if missing?

That's not what ASDF is for. ASDF is like make, Quicklisp is like your OS's package manager. Different tools for different tasks... However in the past ASDF did have functionality to download libraries that were missing (I believe it was called ASDF-Install?) but nowadays that is deprecated in favor of Quicklisp which is more complete and robust, from what I understand.

    Why do so few libraries use GitHub?

Common Lisp has been around a long time, and many older libraries predate GitHub.

    Are there serious open source efforts to modernize documentation?

Yes. You may be interested in the Common Lisp UltraSpec project.

    Are there serious open source efforts to modernize libraries?

There are plenty of people working on new libraries for Common Lisp. There are also projects to update older libraries. For example, there was recently a big fundraiser to update McCLIM, a native Lisp GUI toolkit. The fundraiser was successful and there have been regular updates posted by the leader of the project about the progress being made.

    Would there be any benefit to extending SBCL beyond the Common Lisp standard to better support modern language features and paradigms?

SBCL and most other CL implementations do include extensions. For example, threading is not described in the standard, but SBCL provides an extension to allow Lisp programs to use threads.

    Why aren’t there more libraries using a functional, immutable paradigm? Most seem to use many dynamic variables and large functions spanning multiple screens, with variables mutating throughout

CL is a multi-paradigm programming language. It existed long before purely functional programming a la Haskell became the hip and cool thing to do. CL is not about forcing a specific paradigm on you. If you want that, no one is stopping you from using Clojure, or writing your own CL libraries in a more purely functional style.

    Is it worth the time and energy to develop new libraries to modernize Common Lisp – or perhaps a single extended implementation of it, like SBCL – or would that time and energy be more productively spent in a non-Common Lisp community?

This largely depends on what you need from a language. CL provides many features that other languages still lack, but there are of course areas where other languages are better suited for a specific task. Sometimes the gap is larger or smaller. I think the community is more than happy to give recommendations for libraries for specific tasks, but obviously it would depend on your situation whether those libraries do enough of what you need, or if it wouldn't be worth it trying to code the rest of it yourself."

Have fun!