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A story of Common Lisp standardization
1 point by akkartik 4885 days ago | 2 comments
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html

Choice quote: "One serious problem was that a lot of new people had shown up—the users. And there was no plan for how to incorporate their votes. Some of us (myself included) thought the users should not have a vote because it was not their language. It was alleged to me that the users’ investment was in using the language. That was a new concept for me and I did not immediately resonate to it, although I have come to see this as a legitimate point of view."

:)

Other than that, for all my railing against Common Lisp, it was good to gain insight into how the decisions they made, and how the world they lived in was different from ours.

via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3918032



1 point by jsgrahamus 4885 days ago | link

What are your rails? :=)

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1 point by akkartik 4884 days ago | link

The standard libraries have poor names, over-complex interfaces. The eq vs eql vs equal nonsense, for starters (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=13690, http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=14596). Many standard functions have crappy control abstractions (http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=13664).

I find many of the interactive features to be over-engineered and/or under-documented. I've never been able to use the condition system to do anything useful. It's not apparent what compiler errors are recoverable and how to recover from them.

I dislike its package management. But this is a general criticism of most languages -- no matter how late-bound the language, there's a consistent temptation toward early binding for performance reasons (see the latter half of http://arclanguage.org/item?id=15587, ie footnote 1. Also http://arclanguage.org/item?id=12057)

Bottomline: while lispers like to say the world hasn't fully understood the power of 70's lisp, it's equally true that Common Lisp is stuck in the 70's and hasn't benefited from ergonomic advances of the past 20 years. It still uses UPPERCASE. These issues are certainly minor compared to having macros. But they carry some weight.

:)

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