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Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

Lisp is old. Libraries suck. GC is a problem? Really?

Age is a feature, IMO. If it survived this long and is still such an important language -- that counts for a lot with me. It means I get to stand on the shoulders of 40+ years of research and development.

The libraries don't suck... there's just not the same proliferation of libraries that other languages have enjoyed. However, I find that the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower. In other words, there are few libraries but few of them suck.

(The lack of documentation however, is a problem, IMO).

Lisp is a good language. It's still a good language.

It has plenty of nice features, a uniform and simple syntax, great tools, and is fun.

I just wish more people were developing software with it these days. :)

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I'm not a LISP hater, far from it, I love the language.

In 2006 I wrote a complex multi-threaded socket and web server that talked to MySQL. I wrote it first in ACL, ported it to CMCL, then to Ruby, and then parts of it (with another programmer) to C (ultra high performance after that). So I got a head to head comparison for the same task.

As to libraries in 2006 (and Ruby libs are only better now). It was easy in Ruby to find libs to talk to third party APIs like Twitter, Facebook, Photobucket, etc. None of this existed in CL. They might be quirky, but they were there.

In ACL/CMCL "core" libraries like sockets and database access tended to be missing a lot of "fringe" (not really that fringe) features like transactions, multiple database support, enums, bigints, etc. But worse than that they tended to mysteriously hang under moderate volume. I found this true on both ACL and CMCL, different libs.

The equivalent Ruby libs, like ActiveRecord, had some SERIOUS quirks, and were missing some of those "fringe" features (I added a lot of them like multi-db, enums, and bigints). But fundamentally, they were more modern in design and reliable. ActiveRecord almost never crashed or hung. Yeah, it did some crazy and stupid things, and performance was a problem. But it didn't hang. When writing real production code mysterious hang/crash/corruption bugs are just a deal killer.

I'm very sympathetic to this exact problem. I love writing code in a Lisp, the language is a beauty. Working in rendering/visualiztion, there are no real lisps that are usable for the performance characteristics that we need, which is a problem in itself, but I do find that I am able to write much of my personal code in more dynamic languages.

For a while I was trying to get practical code written in scheme, but it then became clear that there were probally about 40 people in the world trying to write actual usable code in scheme, and not just using it academically, eventually, I gave up, and started using CL, because at least, there are and/or have been, people trying to create real products with CL, and there are real sets of libraries.

But again, every once in a while, I decide to write a side-project in Ruby, due to one reason or another, existing libraries, or working with others, and the simple fact of the matter is that atop of Ruby being a reasonable approximation of everything I want from Lisp, macros aside, it has, simply a much more mature set of libraries. In my experience not only am I more likely to find a specific library for Ruby, but it is much more likely to be well tested and production-ready.

The project is named "CMUCL."

Sorry you had trouble. I'm glad to say there are more libraries available now than in 2006, and the picture, both in terms of volume and quality, keeps improving.

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