Posts about Common Lisp
Hello fellow Lispers,
I have now been writing clojure for about half a year and have been quite productive with it. Seems like a neat ecosystem with cider on emacs, some linters and clojuredocs.org open it's very productive. My problem is that my preferred domain of programming isn't well supported: web scraping.
The platform / binaries: I'd really prefer to make a binary, which when using clojure with web requests and/or some html parser seems nigh impossible, and it would be a hack either way through graalvm.
lquery > hickory: Clojures de-facto html parser (hickory) is pretty bad compared to what I can see at first glance checking out the cookbook.
no cons pair: r/lispmemes bullies us, but I'm sure there is some point in that I can't easily craft trees in clojure. Maybe I'm missing sth.
not only parens: Typing
{and[on a german keyboard requires significantly more finger contortion than(. Also paredit doesn't like the fake parens.
CLOS: I like functional programming and it's idioms, relying on higher order functions to implement most of what I do. From various corners of the internet it seems like CLOS is just the way you do serious common lisp development.
Missing sly inspector: Cider has an inspector where I can have a detailed view of the last eval's result in a split. Very useful for traversing dom trees whenever I have to, as that doesn't fit in the message area. Did I miss it with sly? Is it maybe available in slime?
No good clojuredocs.org pendant: I have only found the cookbook so far, which is neat for an overview and certainly a better starting point than practical common lisp for someone that already somewhat knows what they're doing in lisp. Do you guys have some website with definitions of the builtin functions along community submitted notes and examples?
Linters: You guys don't have those? Don't like those? Seems weird to me that decades old lisp critic and some linter from the lem dev is all that gets indexed by my search engine of choice.
Library discovery: How do I find what I need?
I'd really appreciate some input on the matter, as it would likely take a week or two until I'd be as productive in common lisp as I am in clojure and I wouldn't want to make the switch on a whim.
Edit (after 2h): to clarify on linting, I'm primarily looking for a replacement of kibit. This linter tells you when you miss idioms. e.g. you use (first (next x)) when (fnext x) exists. Or you use (not (= x y)) when (not= x y) exists.A formatter would be nice too, but I can definitely forego clj-kondo or eastwood like linters
Edit (after 7h): loving the engagement on this. It seems as of now like a scheme would be more aligned with my programming style and preferences. I've been particularly impressed by the talk A Guiler's Year of Racket. It seems to me like scheme trades a price in versatility and raw power for quality and coherence when contrasted with common lisp, and for me that's a worthwhile tradeoff
Edit (after 22h): racket it is!
The "Why Lisp?" article recently made it to the front page of HN. Comments are here. It created a lot more commentary than I expected it might, mostly around
non-pthread-style concurrency;
"zero-cost abstractions", and
static typing.
"Why Lisp?" articles come around at least once a year. I even wrote my own, but never published it. They're fun to read as a Lisper, but I can also commiserate with non-Lispers in that it's difficult to grok the benefits when they're stated without examples. (It seems, for good reason, that concrete examples are lacking in Lisp. How do you show an example of why interactive and incremental development is a unique and useful feature of Common Lisp?)
A lot of commentary usually evolves (or devolves) into Lisp being a great hobbyist language and a bad industrial language. Or it's a dead language that hasn't caught up. Or whatever else that's repeated ad nauseum in comparison to the popular languages at any given time.
I am, of course, a proponent of using it in business so long as modern coding practices are adhered to, there's a shared sense of "no nonsense" amongst the participating developers, and leadership is strong. But I've also worked in industries like quantum computing where there's no playbook for the problems/solutions of the fieldโallowing more, let's say, idiosyncratic approaches.
I'm very curious to hear, especially from Lispers but really anyone, what technical aspects of Common Lisp would make it a legitimately cumbersome choice in present or past jobs? Even better, if you did use Lisp, what were the problem areas and what would it take to ameliorate them?
EDIT:
Please join the project GitHub repo if you would like to contribute or be notified of updates: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9
Hello everyone,
I'm putting out this feeler to gauge interest in developing a new open source 3D graphics in Common Lisp. Hoping to assemble a team for this.
The idea would be to develop a system along the lines of Blender/Maya/Houdini, but oriented towards the strengths of Common Lisp.
Looking for contributors of all kind who are enthusiastic about the idea.
I'm an old-time 3D developer who has worked in CL on and off for many years. But I don't consider myself an expert, and am hoping to attract a cool group of people.
A little about me: โข wrote 3D animation software used in โJurassic Parkโ โข software R&D lead on โFinal Fantasy: The Spirits Withinโ movie โข senior software developer on โThe Hobbitโ films
A proof of concept system I have been developing over the past few months:
Source: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9
Demo: https://youtu.be/NJe4isZ7NHI
I am well aware that this will be a large undertaking. This is my first such project, so please bear with me as we figure out the process together.
Do get in touch if you are interested. I have a feeling this might lead to something exciting. :)
Regards,
Kaveh