| I'm sorry, but this doesn't address what I said. I know the lisp community stands behind Edi Weitz and I respect him, but compared to Python's "Batteries Included" or Perl's standard regular expression library, your solution is problematic. Consider: Weitz's library is just one of five possible regular expression libraries listed on Cliki! Why did you choose his? Weitz's library isn't even the top choice! Are the others broken? Unreliable? Do I have to try them all? Now, I realize such simple questions as these may not be "breaking new ground in programming theory," but a lot us just want a turn-key solution that works everywhere; the sort that sysadmins use everyday to keep companies humming and the internet buzzing. That's the definition of "practical" that I'm hung up on. If I want to do command line text processing with pipes--and many do--how does lisp help me more than Awk? Awk is brilliant in its problem space; it's fairly standardized; it's guaranteed to be everywhere. Choosing Awk or Perl or Python is practical--not being a slave to fashion (trapped in the popularity contest you allude to) I think you know this, and I think you know just how practical Python/Perl/Awk/Ruby are, which is why you subtly changed your argument from "practical" without qualification to "managing huge and complex problems" by the end of your response, even though the parent specifically includes hobby programming in his classification of "practical" problems. I think it's cool that you've done "web, database, scripting, 3D game programming, etc" in lisp and can even think in lisp. And I admire your willingness to battle past CL's 1000+ page spec and then the sea of competing libraries to find the one you like and are willing to debug yourself if something is broken. But that doesn't invalidate all the other tools--it just means there can be more than one way to do it. |