Comment by ohyes

15 years ago

http://www.quicklisp.org/

By Lisp, perhaps he was referring also to Scheme and Clojure. Not everyone is aware that they're Lisps, too. (Detailed rationale and citation needed.)

For Scheme, nothing's ever really gotten off the ground. Little more needs to be said on the subject than "R6RS module system debacle." There are meta-module systems for Scheme. I'm waiting for the meta meta-module system.

Clojure, however, has http://clojars.org/ and lein (and cake). I've found that Clojure programmers are way more prone to look for something that exists and (perhaps mostly) fits the bill before rolling their own. I attribute this not to Clojure programmers being smarter or better human beings but to the relative ease of creating, searching, and resolving package dependencies.

  • Regarding Clojure, perhaps this is because the audience of the language is different than other Lisps. I do think that a lot of Clojure users are first time lispers or old-time lispers that moved to something else and are now coming back thanks to the current "fame" of the language. Simply put, Clojure-ers have an unusual background compared to other lispers.

    As far as I'm concerned, I'm quite pleased by the Clojure ecosystem (even though I do hope it will extend) and, coming from Python, don't have too much trouble getting things done (besides struggling with my OOP habits / lisp itself).

  • The Scheme community is too fragmented for a meta meta-module system to work. Racket and Chicken both have decent module repositories, at least. (Probably some others do, too.)

    No meaningful experience with Clojure, but it probably inherits some library culture from running on the JVM as well.

    • Clojure sure does. Look at something like maven. It has lots of features but alot of people don't like it. All we needed in Clojure were some people to creat good abstraction over maven and boom! we have a great package system.

      If you want to live on something like the JVM you have to use all its powers to the max because if you don't its weaknesses will be bigger then the its benefits you get.

Quicklisp has a long way to go before it's comparable to something like CPAN, but you have to start somewhere, right?

  • It is orders of magnitude better than what we had previously.

    The only thing that worries me is that it seems that you are running it mostly by yourself?

    Is this true? That must be a lot of work. I hope you can devise a way to have multiple maintainers. (I suppose the source is out there, so everyone could have their own node, but that might defeat the purpose...)

    • It's not much work - and Common Lisp makes me 10 times more productive!

      I intend to publish more tools and set up more infrastructure to make collaboration and delegation easier, but it all takes time.