From: Brian McCallister <brianm@...>
Date: 2005-07-26T10:07:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Lisp on Lines


On Jul 25, 2005, at 8:55 PM, luke wrote:

>
> Thanks Dave for the interesting post. Would these problems be  
> solved if
> Common Lisp went open source?

Er, there are quite a few open source CL implementations

     http://www.cliki.net/Common%20Lisp%20implementation

-Brian

>
> 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" <dfayram@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:6fb0069505072515455ea2ecc1@mail.gmail.com...
> On 7/24/05, William James <w_a_x_man@yahoo.com> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>