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by btilly 2310 days ago
And that is the problem.

Lispers wind up with a myriad of incompatible Lisps, and a solution written for one may or may not be portable to the next. Sure, you can call them all Lisp. But Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Clojure, and Racket are, syntactic similarities notwithstanding, actually different languages. A library written for one will generally not work for the others.
1 comments
jacobwilliamroy 2310 days ago
Then its only a ten-minute diversion to modify that library to work with my lisp. Or to build a library in my lisp which can work with that library.
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btilly 2310 days ago
I disbelieve.

A complex application written with CLOS will generally not be portable to Emacs Lisp. An application written in Emacs Lisp that takes advantage of dynamic scope won't be easy to port to Clojure. A library in Clojure that wraps something in the JVM ecosystem won't work in Racket. And something written in Racket using continuations or Pict generally won't be easy to port to Common Lisp.

And even with closer Lisps than that, I have enough experience of "that should be easy to port" then blowing up over minor details to be suspicious. Sometimes it will be 10 minutes. Sometimes it will be several weeks and incomplete even then. The latter happens often enough that, the developer's confidence notwithstanding, the average is waaaay longer than the estimated 10 minutes. (The phenomena of tasks being rarely faster than we thought, but roadblocks can be unlimited in extent is generally true in programming. This is one of the reasons why our time estimates tend to be systemically low.)

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jacobwilliamroy 2310 days ago
And if the library is not easy to port, then writing an interface which generates code that DOES work with that library is easy to do.
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btilly 2310 days ago
I still disbelieve.

I've done this. I've seen other people do this. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it works fine for the demo but then has weird failure modes that you trip over in production months later.

It may be the right thing to do. It may be feasible. But a general "10 minute job" estimate is laughable.

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