Some thoughts about raising the profile of Lisp
I must be mellowing in my old age (possibly as opposed to bellowing) because I have been getting praise and compliments recently on comments in various places.
Don't worry, there are still people angrily shouting at me as well.
This was the earlier comment, I think... There was a slightly forlorn comment in the Reddit Lisp community, talking ( Read more... )
Don't worry, there are still people angrily shouting at me as well.
This was the earlier comment, I think... There was a slightly forlorn comment in the Reddit Lisp community, talking ( Read more... )
> can get.
A good point. This is true, but there is the issue that GUIs now have settled and standardised to a large degree. Compared to the wild years of the '80s, now, users absolutely expect standard controls, in standard places, and standard mouse actions, keystrokes and so on. Some are very minimal, e.g. GNOME 3, which throws out a lot of stuff, from maximise/minimize controls to menu bars, but it still keeps close buttons, dialog buttons and so on.
Even switching back to RISC OS, an OS I lived in daily for years, is hard now because it doesn't play nice like Windows $whatever, Mac OS $whatever, and Linux $whatever.
> Distinguish between Interlisp, the language, and Medley, the programming environment.
Valid, but perhaps more relevant to the FOSS project than me.
> Medley also supports a CL called Xerox Common Lisp, which has one major problem: it's CLtL1+
> rather than ANSI
I don't know enough to parse that.
> and when that gets fixed, then "develop on Medley, deploy on SBCL" will make a ton of sense.
How about "dump the old proprietary dialect and rebase in modern CL so it works on SBCL"?
> I have also had a bit of thought around implementing the Interlisp language (in which the
> Medley tools are written) in SBCL, which would give a huge boost in performance (though it
> doesn't matter that much given the 1000X hardware speedup since the D-machines were built.
Sounds good. Not ideal but pragmatic.
Lisp is meant to be very good for new DSLs and so on. Probably plausible.
> There is nothing *illegal* about running OpenGenera today. At most you could be sued by the
> copyright owner.
Comes back to the old GPL freedoms, really, doesn't it?
• Can you redistribute it? No.
• Can you distribute things you made with it, without distributing it too? No.
• Can you modify it? No.
• Can you sell things you made with it? No.
And so on.
You can _run_ it, sure, but what you make remains locked within it. As such, it's just a curiosity. And that's tragic.
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