Re: Are we close to a Lisp boom ?

Ken Tilton <kennytilton@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
>
>> IMO, not until CL goes through another standardization process, not
>> for the language this time, but for a few libraries: comm, stream,
>> unicode, thread.
>
> Yeah, the damn thing is unusable as it is.

It's not that it's unusable (that's clearly false, as every project
written in CL clearly demonstrates); it's that it's less usable than
would otherwise be the case.  It's not an issue of black-and-white: it's
an issue of lighter vs. darker grey.  There was a time when CLOS was not
standardised; as The Art of the Metaobject Protocol demonstrates, it
could always be rolled by hand.  Surely you agree that a single
standardised CLOS is better than a dozen similar-but-incompatible OOP
libraries?  In the same way, standardising libraries would be useful.

The existing pretty-much-similar sockets libraries should be
standardised.  Gray Streams should be standard.  Unicode should be the
new standard, with clearly-defined migration paths for legacy encodings
(I'm not up on my Unicode specs--perhaps there are some suggestions
already there).  Threading and multi-processing should be standardised.

Something interesting would be standard message-passing based on the
Erlang model.  I don't know if there's any agreement that the Erlisp
model is the right way to do this though.  It would be nice for CL to be
as far ahead of the curve again as it once was.  Garbage collection and
closures are pretty common now; optional and keyword arguments are not
unknown (c.f. Python); macros are at a tipping point (people realise
they need them, and are trying to figure out how to get them in
irregular languages); CLOS-style generic functions are in a similar
position; conditions still haven't caught on; I think that integrating
some of Erlang's features might be a way to do for multiprocessing what
CLOS did for OOP.


>> Too bad there isn't a benevolent angel that could fund such
>> an expenditure <hint>PG</hint>.
>
> Nah, he went broke trying to do a start-up with CL, a Web store I think.

PG's too busy reinventing the wheel with Arc to do anything for CL.

-- 
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
People who do technical sup****t for a living are bitter, twisted and
uncharitable.  Eight hours a day of telling people what's already in the
manual [...] results in a steady and inexorable progression towards a
state of depressive sociopathy.                        --dansdata.com