The lisp community has a rap among non-members to be full of smug bastards. Actually it is just all the copies of Paul Graham floating around because of functional arguments.
I really wanted to like CL, but the smug inadequacy of its (free) implementations, the awkward holes in every facet of the standard library, and the pigheaded refusal to act as a client of my actual OS instead of pretending to be a separate, incompatible machine…were just not worth fighting with anymore. I'll stick with development platforms that still care about practicality and usefulness, tyvm.
As a Lisper this thread made me laugh. Does that make me smug? Actually it is just all the copies of Paul Graham floating around because of functional arguments.
Are there really that many? I've only seen a few newbies/trolls acting like that. Most lispers have different attitudes, but PG's two lisp books are decent and recommended reading material, if you're okay with his ENTERPRISE-less writing style that goes against some good CL style guidelines.
>>5
What implementations have you tried and what problems do you have with them?
I use CCL and SBCL daily and am very happy with them (on Win32 and Linux).
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Anonymous2010-01-18 10:45
Are there really that many?
I'm not sure there are any. All the people who feel self-important by their language choice moved on the Haskell some time ago!
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Anonymous2010-01-18 10:58
>>7
CCL. I used to use LW but the interface freaks the everliving shit out of me.
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9 2010-01-18 11:01
In an unrelated note, though, I use PLT Scheme and Chicken more as standalone Schemes and S9 Scheme as my go-to for plugging in holes.
>>9
There were some bad bugs in CCL in some older version from half a year ago, but current ones seemed pretty stable to me.
I've used LW for a bit, but I'm too used to working with Emacs to switch to their minimalistic interface(however it can be connected to Emacs). There is one really nice thing about LW's interface and that's their debugger: you can visualize as you step in/out of/through through the forms, macroexpand and even un-macroexpand at will. I wish Emacs would have such a fancy debugging interface (I can do everything possible in that GUI using standard CL expressions/special-forms/macros, but having a debugger like that would save the typing, Emacs can macroexpand(-1) and do some limited stepping+breakpoints, as well as view local stackframes if proper debug settings are used, but it's still far from LW's debugger's interactivity, even though it's more than enough for casual tasks).