You absolutely can use it without CLOS. It was an afterthought poorly bolted on that was worse than its predecessor in most ways as to be portable. It didn't exist when CLtL1 was written and barely existed when CLtL2 was released.
* 123
123
* (describe *)
123
[fixnum]
* (describe 'fixnum)
COMMON-LISP:FIXNUM
[symbol]
FIXNUM names the built-in-class #<BUILT-IN-CLASS COMMON-LISP:FIXNUM>:
Class precedence-list: FIXNUM, INTEGER, RATIONAL, REAL, NUMBER, T
Direct superclasses: INTEGER
No subclasses.
Sealed.
No direct slots.
Anyway, you see what I mean now by not being able to use Common Lisp without the CLOS. Unless by using the CLOS you mean having to explicitly opt-in by using classes, multiple dispatch, multiple inheritance, generic functions, the MOP and all that weird stuff.
Yes, that's what I meant. The fact that the CL type system maps into the class system doesn't mean we all code OOP. If you want to argue semantics, sure..
SBCL will generate _very_ different code for fixnums vs general objects, so much so that claiming that (+ 1 2) is using CLOS makes no sense.
HN's really starting to put me off with suchlike rife blanket-damning posts that are uninformative and usually come from people who have little experience.
This account is 52 days old, but the user behind this has been reading and posting on HN for a bit longer (let's say since PG decided to put HN online).
For the other comment, my point is that "genuinely wise" is much rarer nowadays, and instead we're drowning in "genuinely clueless". This is why you shouldn't learn about something's worth by reading HN comments nowadays. Instead you can put a limited amount of time actually studying the subject and then decide if it's worthy of more of your time or not.
I get further pissed off by having people argue back when I say something from my small island of expertise (SQL and a few other things) they clearly know less than me - I can't learn from them and they won't learn from me. I don't mind n00bs, we all were once, but to willingly remain n00bs by rejecting information, well I can't comprehend it.
I miss posts from the likes of BeeOnRope. The really good people get driven away.
You wouldn't go into why JavaScript is bad to point out that you don't need to write JavaScript to make a web page. You would just note that JavaScript was a late addition to the web and wasn't the first language usable on it.
Plenty of people were writing CL before CLOS existed.
You opined in addition on the quality of clos. That could have been very useful if you'd explained it.
But I agree about general data structures. Some of the sequence functions are generic but not enough of them. I presume this happened because circa 1990 generic dispatch was too slow to handle high speed data traversal. That's no longer true, and many libraries exist to "generify" more of Common Lisp.