From: luke Date: 2005-07-26T09:55:59+09:00 Subject: Re: Lisp on Lines Thanks Dave for the interesting post. Would these problems be solved if Common Lisp went open source? I noticed a post on a site http://lemonodor.com/archives/000671.html that suggests there are some promising dialects of Lisp that are open source, but currently aren't as rich as, say Common Lisp. When choosing a new and flexible language, one of the deciding factors for me choosing Ruby was the fact it was open source. "Dave Fayram" wrote in message news:6fb0069505072515455ea2ecc1@mail.gmail.com... On 7/24/05, William James wrote: > How much less powerful than Lisp is Ruby? > Lisp has many more features, in fact the entire language could be viewed as a feature expression system. That doesn't mean that Ruby is at a huge disadvantage. Ruby has most of the important parts of lisp. It does lack macos, but very few languages have the uniform syntax necessary to make macros as easy and natural as they are in Lisp. Ruby has higher order functions (albeit with a keyword massage sometimes), lambdas, closures, garbage collection, and OO. Some people would argue that Lisp's Object system, CLOS, is more powerful than Ruby's because it supports multiple dispatch, and it may be true that some things express themselves more gracefully in CLOS, but Ruby's method has a lot of strengths too. Ruby also has a very strong advantage in the meta-object-programming department. While CL does have a standard for this, called "the MOP," implementation is spotty and often subtle details cause incompatibility across Lisp interpreters, and the MOP itself is often poorly understood even on comp.lang.lisp. Actually, that's kind of the story of modern Lisp. "Subtle details cause incompatibility across Lisp interpreters." It's sad to see such a fine language ritualistically beat and abuse itself, but its community insists on a perpetual fork. This fork doesn't just extend between open source and commerical lisps, which might be understandable, but also among several open source inheritors, none of which really could constitute a universal distribution. -- -- Dave Fayram (II) dfayram@lensmen.net dfayram@gmail.com