Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtdewcmu | Hacker News Reader

I started learning Common Lisp, but ASDF and Quicklisp threw me off. I couldn't tell if you were supposed to choose one or the other or they were used together. This might revive my interest in Common Lisp if I get around to reading it. But in the meantime I drifted off to Racket, which is relatively well documented and has extensive libraries and really unique features.

View on HN

The packaging story in common lisp is.... Not great.

It's hamstrung by archaic naming conventions that confuse newcomers. What CL calls a system is roughly analogous to what most other languages call a package. What CL calls a package is what other languages call a namespace.

Despite all that it's a pretty good language if you can find libraries for what you need. The de facto standard implementation (sbcl) has a very good compiler and an acceptable GC. The language itself is expressive and it makes for very quick and pleasant DX. I love writing common lisp.

Is it archaic? A lisp program is a dynamic image. A collection of symbol is very aptly named a package. And third party module can be named as a system (collection of packages).

Agreed, and I think package as used by Common Lisp and Java is more common than “namespace” which the parent commenter believes is the modern word for that!

> * What CL calls a system is roughly analogous to what most other languages call a package.*

Or a crate, or an artifact, or a module, or a gem, and there's probably other variations I can't remember off-hand.

> * What CL calls a package is what other languages call a namespace.*

Or a module, or a package, or... actually, I don't know what Perl or Ruby call it. I believe C calls it a header, but that's not quite the same thing as a package.

Turns out naming things is difficult (as well as cache invalidation, off-by-one errors concurrency, and).

Racket has packages (1) that work quite well. Chicken Scheme has Eggs.

(1) https://docs.racket-lang.org/pkg/index.html

Eggs? Goodness. And I believe Chicken is R5RS as well, so I don't know what they call libraries/modules/packages/whatever (in R6RS and R7RS they're called libraries, but R5RS didn't specify anything). I expect Racket to call them libraries considering the Racket/R6RS connections.

For anybody who's still confused, the tl;dr is ASDF is the actual package loading mechanism, Quicklisp doubles as an ASDF wrapper and a package manager.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com