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On Lisp

Name: Anonymous 2013-12-28 9:08

Of course, it's feature complete!

Common Lisp is its own standard library. Here are its contents: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index.htm

It's got a whopping 980 functions for all your needs with intuitive and easy to remember names like least-negative-normalized-double-float, update-instance-for-redefined-class, load-logical-pathname-translations, simple-condition-format-arguments, internal-time-units-per-second, pprint-exit-if-list-exhausted and so on. Of course, it purposefully lacks the negligible nonsense like a graphical toolkit, image processing, nonblocking asynchronous IO, remoting, cryptography, SQL, text processing, archive tools, concurrency, parallelism, thread-safe data structures, monitoring & management, printing support, sound and processing, XML toolkits - all of that is useless, after all! The most important thing is that you get to use anaphoric lambdas and pandoric captures whilst munching on momma's tasty soup!

Seriously, you say "a core library" as if Lisp is a practical general-purpose PL. It's a lie. Lisp is no such thing, hence such a short stub in place of a core library and a trashpile of unmaintained cruftworks from fanboy-soup-eaters (a.k.a. CLiki). Look at the core libs of industrial-strength languages like Java or Python. They were forged in the fires of practical problem-solving over many years. While the Lispers have spent the whole 50 years of their totem's existence forging only one thing: their self-aggrandizement.

Although, to do Lisp justice, it should be noted that Franz and Allegro did crank out their bicycle-crutch-ersatz-"core" libraries. This is because during lisp-hype of the 80-90ies these gescheftmachers have managed to get several rich yet clueless Pinocchios addicted to the Lisp drug. Like Boeing, for example. And when the Pinocchios started trying to solve real problems lispishly, they had to hurriedly plug that gaping hole. So go ahead and spend some $4500 for a real Lisp - it's an easy sum for a Lisper, right? - and welcome to the miraculous world of Professional Lisp Pinocchios.

Name: More on Lisp 2014-01-01 16:31

Lisp offers a lot of flexibility, at the price of macro-friendly syntax, rather than user-friendly. Besides the overrated problem of getting used to those lots of parentheses, it's all too tempting to mix macros and normal code in Lisp, in a way that doesn't visually stand out; this really doesn't encourage the writing of reusable, mutually compatible libraries. As a result of this extreme flexibility, large scale collaboration doesn't seem to happen, and Lisps lack a de facto comprehensive set of standard libs, besides those included in Common Lisp's specification. Comparisons have been drawn between getting Lispers to work together and herding cats...

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