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by adrusi
3840 days ago
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The whole point of common lisp, the reason it has survived since the beginning of time, is that the language was designed so that language innovation happened by people developing libraries for it. Complaining that common lisp hasn't evolved is like complaining that free-software posix systems haven't evolved. True, the posix standard hasn't evolved much, but its not meant to, it's meant to be evolved by the userspace programs and libraries that people write. Yes, this approach is not the best approach to getting mass adoption, and there are benefits to mass adoption — people can help you, there's a bigger pool of people to hire, etc (I think its much more important to companies than individuals). But mass adoption isn't always the goal. I suppose you can consider Ruby analogous to Ubuntu while common lisp is like a *bsd distribution (or arch, gentoo, slack...). Ubuntu is great, all Ubuntu installations start from the same starting point, and the potential for customization is limited (try changing Ubuntu's init system), so you can just ask a question on stack overflow and get an answer with instructions specific to how your system works. And companies are more likely to pick Ubuntu than gentoo, because its better supported and supposedly more stable. That doesn't mean that people consider the distributions where the user can pick and choose exactly what their system does (like a common lisp programmer does by picking out libraries of macros) to be any worse of a distribution. Quite the contrary, the mythos seems to consider these distributions better in some way, like they're a better tool for a more skilled practitioner, a sentiment which has also found its place around common lisp. |
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And that "whole point" hasn't worked very well as to the availability of a rich library ecosystem and/or adoption. So, while it's a nice trait to have, it's perhaps too much of a burden.
>But mass adoption isn't always the goal.
True, but it's not like CL was designed like some researchy or experimental project that doesn't care about mass adoption.