From: Dave Fayram Date: 2005-07-28T08:10:02+09:00 Subject: Re: Lisp on Lines On 7/25/05, luke wrote: > > Thanks Dave for the interesting post. Would these problems be solved if > Common Lisp went open source? It already is, but the quality of open source implementations varies wildly. Not quality as in "are they good." The amount of ego and expertise that tends to reside in the lisp community assures that the projects meet their goals. Quality as in, "What problems does this solve?" Some CMUCL, for example, is an incredibly good compiler when you need very fast lisp. However, it's harder to use than SBCL, which has my vote for easiest lisp distro to use in general (and it's what Peter Seibel distributes as "Lisp In A Box"). On a mac, OpenMCL has a ton of great features. The commerical offerings solve enterprise solution problems. Ever seen a CORBA->Lisp binding? They actually make CORBA usable! But you pay a lot and LispWorks and Allegro still compile slower mathmatical code. > that suggests there are some promising dialects of Lisp that are open > source, but currently aren't as rich as, say Common Lisp. They are all common lisp. And the first thing that drew me to Ruby was its peculiar and very right-seeming "Ruby Way." Matz has impeccable taste in coding, and Ruby reflects that taste. -- -- Dave Fayram (II) dfayram@gmail.com