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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

> The fact that Common Lisp is a standard is both a blessing and a curse. Many developers consider this to be the former, as your code is much less likely to break over time. For others, it means that the language is frozen in time.

This is not a consequence of it being a standard, rather no one has bothered of creating a new revision of the standard, like has been happening with Ada, C, C++, JavaScript,....for the last decades.

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Same thing happened with Standard ML, if I’m not mistaken, with regards to the standard not evolving. It’s a lovely little language that could have been easily pruned with some more modern sensibilities.

almost all bits that make python famous live outside the standard library. moreover nothing in common lisp prevents one from extending the language. in fact quite the opposite, common lisp gives you enormous flexibility to do just this. HOWEVER, what is required in practice is that your library should be popular enough for it to become defacto standard. things like this already exist [1], but common lisp community is quite small so major libraries are nowhere near as common as in other languages. still though, given its size, some exellent projects are under way

[1] https://alexandria.common-lisp.dev/

You have adsf for that, https://asdf.common-lisp.dev/

However that is orthogonal to the language standard.

As for the standard library, and the usual bashing Python batteries get, the great thing about being in the standard library regardless how obtuse it might be, is the guarantee it exists everywhere there is a compliant implementation.

With everything else, it is hit and miss.

im not bashing python. im simply saying that there is nothing stopping extension of common lisp through libraries (see coalton as a recent example of this in cl) as happens in python (eg numpy). that cl is ansi standardized is only a plus because it gurantees to me that massive portions of the language (the whole standard) will allways remain the same

It's an ANSI standard so that makes updates much more painful than otherwise just "updating the spec".

That doesn't prevent Fortran, Ada, C, C++, even COBOL, to get new updates.

I wasn't aware that C and C++ standards are ANSI standards. Good for them then :). Sloppy CL.

They are more than that, ANSI is the US voice on ISO.

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