galdor

Failures are always interesting, but it is incredibly hard to pinpoint why it failed. Lots of things can go wrong, and it is usually a combination of factor that kills a company.

I was once told only to take advice from people who succeeded repeatedly at a task. Building a company and succeeding is impressive, but there may be a lot more factors in play than just the actions of the founders. Building several successful companies makes the difference.

You go with Mailchimp (or equivalent) for newsletters because they give you the subscription form, handle email verification, unsubscriptions, GDPR mentions everywhere, provide useful stats and notifications, segmentation and targeting… Getting email delivered is indeed really hard, especially if you send thousands of emails, but building all these other features is insanely time consuming. The cost of Mailchimp is negligible in comparison.

Same reason why companies use Sendgrid for marketing campaigns.

If you only worked in companies producing web applications, writing CRUD routes all day is indeed incredibly boring. The glue at least gives you the opportunity to work with a larger range of technical subjects.

I did not "make it up on the spot", I simply read their website:

"Typically incidents are chargeable when they require work from us such as writing, compiling or testing patches, updating documentation, analysing or debugging your code, finding workarounds, providing technical advice or other significant effort.

In particular, please note that we may regard fixes for bugs in its own Lisp products, and for shortcomings in the documentation, as chargeable."

Source: http://www.lispworks.com/support/description.html#chargeable

Note how the list and following text clearly indicate that you can and will be charged for bugs in their own products.

I tried to use it when writing my article. It could not even load my initialization file because it is not standard compliant (it does not support the :VERBOSE argument of COMPILE-FILE).

The fact that they use GCC under the hood is interesting though, I'd be curious to see how fast it can get. But standard compliance comes first.

No you do not have to. ASDF knows where to find your ASD files:

https://asdf.common-lisp.dev/asdf.html#Configuring-ASDF-to-f...

Personally I use the (:tree (:home "dev/lisp")) form.

What do you mean by "open [...] in a new REPL"?

You use ASDF:LOAD-SYSTEM to have ASDF load all the content of the system, making it available to you.

Indeed, corrected. Thank you!

I'm not sure what is happening, there are multiple small posts which look like spam, with green nicknames.

Edit: green nicknames are from new accounts. On this page, all of them are spam. At some point it would make sense to just hide them all.

In my opinion, the simplest way is to start with Common Lisp, with SBCL and the Practical Common Lisp book by Peter Seibel.

Make sure you are comfortable with Emacs. It is possible to write Common Lisp without it, but Emacs and SLIME are so much better than anything else it feels like cheating.

But no one is stopping you from building a "full modern standard library". I am doing just that with https://github.com/galdor/tungsten. Of course it would be nice to have a large company do all the work as it is the case for Go, but it is not going to happen. As always, you either do the work yourself or pay someone to do it.

The specification is limited, no doubt about that, but I am convinced that any modernization effort would end up in a huge mess with everyone trying to inject their own preferences from the languages they already know with no regard for the spirit of the original specification.

The commercial aspect is not a problem in my opinion (but again english is not my main language so I might have conveyed the wrong tone). The issue is the pricing model which may work for established company ready to invest money from the start, but is simply out of touch with independant developers and small companies exploring the possibility of using Common Lisp.

Open sourcing Lispworks and selling support contracts and an enterprise version (with CAPI, CORBA, etc.) would make more sense. The world has changed: all other languages have open source implementations; most servers are open source, most databases too. It is hard to convince a company to use Common Lisp, but even harder to justify paying for a proprietary implementation.

And for me personally, Lispworks would force me to buy two licenses (Linux and FreeBSD) for personal use, and two for my solo company. It simply does not make any sense financially speaking.

First time one of my articles lands on HN! Feel free to ask any follow up question.

Postgres is indeed a very good choice, I know I can always count on it.

If I had to choose one, I would go with Emacs. It is not perfect of course; if only it was written in Common Lisp. But it gives me a huge amount of control on everything I use it with: programming, notes (Org), mails (Gnus), and so many other things.

No other software is that customizable.

Thanks for the info. I'm also using both SBCL and CCL, both to stay portable and because it sometimes help finding issues detected by one and not the other.

If you end up blogging about CL (and tech in general) at Feetr, know that there will be at least one interested reader :)

I just realised you were working on Feetr! I learned you guys were using Common Lisp on Twitter. Small world really.

What implementations are you using, and how are you running it in production, if it is not a secret? Any performance issue with the GC at large scale?

Talking about Common Lisp in the places I worked for in the past has always be met with mockery and disdain. But then again, I have seen this kind of reaction for every non-mainstream language, so it is not really surprising.

I'm currently getting back to CL, hoping to do much more with it for 2023. Being able to develop incrementally in SLIME has been a joy. Hopefully I will manage to find the right project idea to apply CL to.

I like the idea of building a newsletter in order to interact with like-minded people. The hard part is to convince these people to subscribe. If you are already well known, it might work. If not, you are back to social networks.

Of course one might question the point of trying to be noticed. But if you want to connect with interesting people, find contract work or grow a small company, building relationships is essential.

As a writer, I have feeds for my Common Lisp and Emacs posts on Planet Lisp and Planet Emacs respectively. I'm hoping to improve visibility on Twitter, which I started using recently.

As a reader, I mostly rely on Planet aggregators. I am thinking about starting to use Elfeed on Emacs to track blogs. But a large number of them do not include full articles in feeds, which is quite annoying.

I'm worried about it as well (single person business, barely started). I was advised by a friend to have an account at another payment processing platform, and be ready to switch very quickly if needed.

Adyen is a possibility. I never used their services so I cannot say if they are a good alternative. But they exist, and some people swear by them.

Shameless self-promotion: I built Eventline (see my profile) precisely because I just wanted to schedule and run code in various environments, manually or in reaction to various events, without the complexity that goes with specialized tools.

It gives you a pretty flexible job system, identities (secrets), monitoring, notifications, a web interface, a command line tool and a HTTP API. You can build lots of things above it.

Do you have specific use cases in mind ?

Eventline lets you schedule any script; you can of course build and test software, but you can also run recurring data import or processing jobs, report generation, backups, monitoring checks (I have multiple jobs regularly verifying properties of live systems)…

Since you can add parameters to your jobs and run them manually with an auto-generated form, it becomes very simple to create complex tasks and let colleagues use them. You could have tasks to create feature environments, prepare onboarding for new employees, process GDPR requests, all kinds of jobs really.

I do know anything about Ansible AWX, but looking at the documentation, the only thing I can think is that it seems awfully complex when I just want to be able to run script and have a platform to monitor what happens and alert me when it fails.

I just checked for the two Gmail Workspace accounts I am reading using IMAP, and in both cases links are not altered.

Does this replacement occurs for free Gmail accounts ?

http://highscalability.com for anything related to large scale systems has always been full of interesting content.

  Location: near Paris, France
  Remote: preferred
  Willing to relocate: no
  Technologies: Go, C, Ruby, Common Lisp, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Linux, FreeBSD...
  Résumé/CV: available by email
  Email: nmartyanoff@gmail.com

I have 7 years of experience writing several types of backend systems on Linux/BSD, and love working on interesting problems, both solo or in a team. Email me if you want to discuss opportunities.

You're right, the example isn't a good use case for mmap, but it's just here to show how to use osicat for mmapping :)

Hi,

The bitfield patch was merged in the official CFFI repository eight months ago (http://common-lisp.net/gitweb?p=projects/cffi/cffi.git;a=com...)

I have no idea why quicklisp isn't more up-to-date. If you need recent systems, I recommend managing your own set of libraries. Personally I have a "site-lisp" git repository where I include all the systems I use. This is really useful when I need to try bleeding-edge patches.

Edit: I updated http://codemore.org/cl-zmq.html to document this problem.

Oops, sorry. I searched on google first (http://www.google.fr/#hl=en&source=hp&q=egit+site:ne...) and didn't find the other link.