Scicloj Meeting #19: Alan Dipert: Common Lisp for the Curious Clojurian

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3 points·jnxx··4 comments

A fantastic talk by a thoughtful and calm guy.

Gives an overview about common aspects and subtle but important differences, and explains a bit about the culture of Common Lisp.

Together with the books from Edmund Weitz and Peter Seibel this reinforces my impression that, while there are really some good ideas in Clojure, Common Lisp is presently more than a bit under-rated and under-hyped.

Here from an earlier comment a list of things that "modern" Python has now in common with Common Lisp:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26086863

One thing I am wondering is why there apparently exists no easy to use quasi-standard for a GUI library in Common Lisp. At least none that I am aware of.

And I do not see any technical reason for that - my experience is that Clojure, for example, can easily be used in combination with Java's Swing, and Racket has a quite complete and well-integrated GUI library.

Is there any non-obvious technical difficulty for making fully integrated GUI bindings to GTK or Qt5 toolkits?

The commercial offerings of LispWorks and Allegro CL have their GUIs.

LispWorks' CAPI has backends to Windows, macOS / Cocoa and GTK:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/CAPI-M/html/capi...

Qt has the issue of being written in C++, making bindings non-trivial: clasp and ECL can solve this in different ways. GTK bindings exist, but they aren't used all that much. There is a GUI standard, CLIM and an OSS implementation that's being actively worked on ( https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/ ), but it still needs a bit of work before it's in a good place.

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