The currency in the developer community is enthusiasm. | Hacker News Reader

The currency in the developer community is enthusiasm.

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40 pointsraganwald12 comments

The article touches a nice point with regard to implementation of CL by adhering to the ANSI specs.

Since a couple of months I am learning and giving a try to different languages or dialects based on LISP, and also reading a lot of such blogs. This blog is impressive, so were all blogs by PG on arc, and by a lot of others. LISP people all mostly so smart, and are writing so nice and effectively. And most of these smart people are capable of developing their own approach, dialect, libraries or programming languages around LISP. Finally what happens is that a newbie like me, does still not have a clue on which LISP to use to start with, to build a Sinatra(ruby)-like framework.

So I decide to develop my own language/dialect based on some LISP and the result will be again the same. Do too many smart people mean a chaos forever or is (should) there (be) hope for a mainstream LISP?

Do too many smart people mean a chaos forever? Good question:

http://xkcd.com/927/

If you like Lisp, you can also give reading some papers from around the Haskell (and ML etc) community a try. Chris Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures is a good one.(See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf for the PhD thesis, or your local library for the expanded book of the same name.)

Thanks, I m also looking at Haskell, Clojure and some other functional languages; just spent (not lost, enjoyed) a lot of time on Arc which seems to be cooling down a bit in activity.

You may also like the talk "The Next mainstream Programming Language": The developers of the Unreal games show that the structure of current games already fits a functional pattern.

(A quick search shows the slides at http://www.slideshare.net/guest4fd7a2/the-next-mainstream-pr... but I found them in PDF format earlier. If you are lucky enough to find a video of the actualy talk or a paper, please send me a link. Thanks!)

I know you weren't actually asking this, but if you're really looking for a Sinatra-like framework in a Lisp there are some pretty rad ones in Clojure. I've been experimenting with web programming via Clojure and have found it extremely pleasant. Check out this nice tutorial on Heroku's site: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/clojure-web-application

Due to Oracle lawsuits of Google, any JVM based future product risks being a monetization target with software patents by Oracle; that is why I am trying to avoid JVM/Java based languages/dialects; it seems a dead end. or am I wrong?

IANAL but I wouldn't worry about it. I don't think users of Clojure (and Scala, JRuby, Jython etc) are in the same category as Google with Dalvik. All those languages compile (or some combination of interpret and JIT compile) to Java bytecode and then run on JVMs. Oracle's lawsuit against Google had to do with an unlicensed non-conforming Java platform. The Clojure Google group seemed to agree when the suit was announced [1].

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

I totally get and sympathize with the enthusiasm part. But the CL-specific parts (to an outsider) reek of megalomania and no-true-scotsman.

This is an email from 2001.

Can somebody give me a tl;dr? That looks interesting but it's a bit too long for this time of night.

Sort of:

A true developer is a competent, intelligent, caring enthusiast. The author presents himself as true developer of the first (computer industry) generation. His language of choice is Common Lisp, which has an unhealthy community full of negativity and egos. Since the author is enthusiastic about CL, he insists that each community member should be a true developer and help CL succeed.

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