(ABCL) - Common Lisp on the JVM
common-lisp.net
common-lisp.net
Peter Norving wrote it initially as a way to learn Java in 1998. So he decided he'd write Scheme implementation in Java in couple of hours.(I swear, his Java code still looks better than mine today and he wrote it 11 years ago. :))
I see loads of code in JScheme that could have influenced Clojure to some degree.
It has all the relevant constructs you'd need and more. And it runs on a JVM with access to Java lower level libraries.
Far from useless I'd say.
CL is a failure, admit it.
Like what? Those crippled Java wrappers?
> CL is a failure, admit it.
You are a failure, admit it. Since you are not popular (I don't know who you are), you are useless. (Your broken logic in practice.)
I've heard about CL, know a few things about it, and it's a failure nontheless.
Its problem isn't the unpopularity between Blub programmers; its problem is its unpopularity even between geeks. Even language geeks!
Repeating your broken popularity based measurement applied to different group of people does not make it any more correct, sorry.
And languages become popular and unpopular for a reason.
For common lisp, those reasons are:
It's ancient.
Parties interested in it can't agree on anything so its development is stalled.
It claims to have a huge library which is tiny by 2009 standards, and doesn't have vital things like network i/o or unicode. Yes, implementations support those proprietarely, yet noone cares, because it's not in standard libs.
It has problems with reflection, which is doubly awful for a lisp.
CLOS is interesting, but for most uses smalltalkingly simple OO would be much more desirable.
Tool support is neliglible.
Also, you (as others making opinion on language from blog posts) are for some reason fixated on the idea of stuff in standard library. When it's not in standard, it doesn't exist. Wrong.
You forgot that in CL, library developer has the same freedom as CL implementer. You are welcome to roll your own continuations, embedded compiler or transaction layer in your chosen popular blub for example.
All your reasons are superficial.
The "ancient" argument is not worth commenting.
Unicode has just about every CL already implemented.
Explain your reflection reservations. Heard about http://common-lisp.net/project/closer ?
You can emulate single-dispatch of Smalltalk OO in exactly 0% of wrapper code.
And tools, I hardly miss something when tracing, profiling, code completion, live upgrades, image snapshots are either solved by standard, implementation or SLIME.
Also you forgot to write that "LISP is interpreted and slow" once again.
Your "arguments" seemed like common set of misconceptions about CL, the "LISP is slow" is such a folklore that I thought you forgot to write it, that's all.
Being a CL, ABCL places no restrictions about mutability on basic data structures and doesn't have the STM/agent functionality for concurrency built in.
On the other hand, Clojure doesn't have CL's condition system (http://gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-condit...).