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by bitwize
2833 days ago
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Ah, Newlisp. The language whose community makes the Rust Evangelism Strike Force go "hey, guys, can you take it down a notch?" More than once have I seen a programming community get a contingent of Newlisp advocates airdropped into it, only to repeat the same tired Amway-tier sales pitches about how Newlisp is the first Lisp-based language, ever, to be used for practical applications. Which is true only if you ignore the decades of computer science that have been done outside Lutz Mueller's brain. And despite calling itself "new" it uses ideas old enough to sign up for AARP membership, that have been tried and abandoned early in Lisp's development, precisely because they're impractical or a source of bugs when attempting to build real-world applications. So yeah, unless something's changed, it's gonna be a no from me. Don't get me wrong, Newlisp is interesting -- in sort of the same way TempleOS is. But its aggressive tryhard advocacy community just put me right off a language I otherwise might've given a spin. |
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I am a huge newLISP advocate, and I would never dream of claiming that the language was a) first at anything, b) first to be used for practical applications, or c) does not have any limitations or flaws.
I chose to investigate the language about six years ago because I wanted to create web applications with Lisp, and I was having a lot of difficulty getting Common Lisp and Hunchentoot working (purely because of my own ignorance, I'm sure).
Newlisp, and the Dragonfly web framework, had the following advantages to me at the time:
0. It had really clear and easy to understand documentation
1. It was easy for me to get started
2. The syntax was really clean and simple
3. It had native support for parsing XML into S-expressions in a simple way that worked even with very complex XML (which was the case with the application I wanted to build at the time)
4. When combined with Dragonfly, it made it possible to create web applications that were really really fast.
I liked it so much that I ended up making my own web framework, newlisponrockets.com, based on Dragonfly. Since then I've used this framework to make my own website and to create internal tools and prototypes at work.
I don't consider myself a great or knowledgeable programmer, and I can't refute any of the people on Hacker News who mention that newLISP lacks this feature or has this poor design decision. I'm sure both of these things are true. I would never try to sell the language with an Amway-style sales pitch, or claim that it could do things that other languages couldn't.
What I do claim is that it was (and is) a very helpful and useful language for me. That's all.