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Comment by ngcc_hk | Hacker News Reader

worry about this "The latest Parenscript release, version 2.7.1, came out on December 5, 2018 "

The lisp community is a lot more like the Unix community than the JavaScript community. We have a lot of good tools, that work well, and don't need constant poking. Do you worry about the viability or usefulnes of "cd" or "cat" or most of the other core unix tools even though they probably haven't been touched for many many years?

Don't worry if a lisp project hasn't been touched for years. Worry if a project has a boatload of open/known bugs AND hasn't been touched for years.

When I was looking into this months ago I had the same concern. I've read about how common lisp packages tend to become "finished" and not updated after a while, but that doesn't intuitively make sense to me for a package like this that has an external moving target.

How much has JavaScript changed since the last update of ParenScript? How many new language features, that might add real benefit, are not accounted for?

Maybe the answer is that the new features are unnecessary to parenscript, I genuinely don't know, but it would be nice to at least see discussion/acknowledgment of this featured somewhere prominently.

A code generator to JS should produce code that will work flawlessly in a decade-old browser. One of the benefits of working in such a thing in the first place is to be isolated from the churning toilet bowl, and some of the value of that is negated if the project lets itself be churned.

Stability is a feature not a bug.

nb: This project has been going for 13 years.

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