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Common Lisp [New Site]

lisp-lang.org

11 pointsdwc3 comments

Just in case people don't get it, the home page is not your LCD smearing or failing, it's a slightly transparent gradient over a the city night.

It's great that someone is working on bringing back Common Lisp from its deathbed.

However, even on the home page of that website, there are stuff that needs revising in order to make Common Lisp a modern language. This is subjective of course.

  (reduce #'- (reverse (list 1 2 3)))

What's that #'-? Need none of such obscure syntax.

  (mapcar #'string-downcase (list "Hello" "world!"))

WTF is mapcar? The whole car-cons terminology needs to be removed or at least banished to a 'low-level feature' status where most people don't need it, I think. Of course I'm highly influenced by Python where everything has to be written in the way I think, and not the way the computer thinks.

   (make-instance 'book :title "ANSI Common Lisp" :author "Paul Graham")

Make-instance? It's called new in C# and Java which is 3 keystrokes, and in Python and C++ it's exactly 0 keystrokes. It only gets worse with hash-tables:

   (defparameter *d* (make-hash-table))
   (setf (gethash 'a *d*) "b")

which is in Python

   d = {'a': b}

The generalness of Common Lisp means that it's a helluva lot of typing. And reading too! To get people to use it much, I think these areas need a lot of improvement.

And promoting SLIME as an IDE is not ideal either. I know it is amazing, and I use Emacs a lot, but the learning curve for Emacs itself is so steep, and it's so different from anything else currently in use, that I think this in itself is able to drive a lot of people away from Lisp. Not to mention that even though Emacs does exist for Windows, every package update or new release comes with an awful lot of new bugs that come from very few or no testing on Windows. Common Lisp needs an IDE of JetBrains quality and ease of use.

    (reduce #'- (reverse (list 1 2 3)))

You can use:

    (reduce (function -) (reverse (list 1 2 3)))

    (reduce '- (reverse (list 1 2 3)))

Then

    (mapcar #'string-downcase (list "Hello" "world!"))

Use:

    (map 'list #'string-downcase (list "Hello" "world!"))

> Make-instance? It's called new in C# and Java which is 3 keystrokes,

Slightly advanced users type m - i complete.

If you want to call it 'new', then just add 'new'. Common Lisp is extensible.

    CL-USER 32 > (defclass a () ((b :initarg :b)))
    #<STANDARD-CLASS A 4020124173>

    CL-USER 33 > (setf (symbol-function 'new) #'make-instance)
    #<STANDARD-GENERIC-FUNCTION MAKE-INSTANCE 4100096004>

    CL-USER 34 > (new 'a :b 10)
    #<A 4020133143>

Hashtables, since Common Lisp is a programmable language, that syntax is user extensible. Example:

    CL-USER 42 > (defparameter *h* #{(a 5) (c 6) (b 3)})
    *H*

    CL-USER 43 > *h*
    #{(C 6) (B 3) (A 5)}

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