[headhasthoughts]

You absolutely can use it without CLOS. It was an afterthought poorly bolted on that was worse than its predecessor in most ways as to be portable. It didn't exist when CLtL1 was written and barely existed when CLtL2 was released.

[TurboHaskal]

Ok, I will try to use Common Lisp without the CLOS:

  * 123
  123

That looks good, let's see...

  * (describe *)
  123
    [fixnum]

Huh? What's a FIXNUM?

  * (describe 'fixnum)
  COMMON-LISP:FIXNUM
    [symbol]

  FIXNUM names the built-in-class #<BUILT-IN-CLASS COMMON-LISP:FIXNUM>:
    Class precedence-list: FIXNUM, INTEGER, RATIONAL, REAL, NUMBER, T
    Direct superclasses: INTEGER
    No subclasses.
    Sealed.
    No direct slots.

Uh-oh.

Anyway, you see what I mean now by not being able to use Common Lisp without the CLOS. Unless by using the CLOS you mean having to explicitly opt-in by using classes, multiple dispatch, multiple inheritance, generic functions, the MOP and all that weird stuff.

[dj_mc_merlin]

> Unless by using the CLOS you mean having to explicitly opt-in by using classes, multiple dispatch, multiple inheritance, generic functions, the MOP and all that weird stuff.

Yes, that's what I meant. The fact that the CL type system maps into the class system doesn't mean we all code OOP. If you want to argue semantics, sure..

SBCL will generate _very_ different code for fixnums vs general objects, so much so that claiming that (+ 1 2) is using CLOS makes no sense.

[TurboHaskal]

It makes sense to me. The same as claiming that doing `1 + 2` in OCaml is making use of the type system despite me not writing any type information and the language performing type erasure.

[zasdffaa]

This "afterthought ... poorly bolted ... worse than its predecessor" is a type of HN comment that's too common. Not being a CLOS or Lisp user, I have no idea why you say this and can learn nothing from it.

HN's really starting to put me off with suchlike rife blanket-damning posts that are uninformative and usually come from people who have little experience.

[creepycrawler]

Indeed, this type of threads always remind me that HN is not the same as it used to be. If you wish to learn about something (including about its worth), it's not the right place. Read books; read and write code; form your own opinions.

[creepycrawler]

Replying to self because HN doesn't show me reply buttons to this comment's children.

This account is 52 days old, but the user behind this has been reading and posting on HN for a bit longer (let's say since PG decided to put HN online).

For the other comment, my point is that "genuinely wise" is much rarer nowadays, and instead we're drowning in "genuinely clueless". This is why you shouldn't learn about something's worth by reading HN comments nowadays. Instead you can put a limited amount of time actually studying the subject and then decide if it's worthy of more of your time or not.

[zasdffaa]

Perhaps.. but clueless comments are usually evident by the very lack of solid info. So why even post?

I get further pissed off by having people argue back when I say something from my small island of expertise (SQL and a few other things) they clearly know less than me - I can't learn from them and they won't learn from me. I don't mind n00bs, we all were once, but to willingly remain n00bs by rejecting information, well I can't comprehend it.

I miss posts from the likes of BeeOnRope. The really good people get driven away.

[headhasthoughts]

Your account is 52 days old, which I will admit is a poor way to estimate how long someone's been around. Look at any old thread around Arc's release and you'll see the comment quality was even lower than here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=106398

[zasdffaa]

Yes and no, books are fab but words from the genuinely wise can save you a lot of otherwise wasted time so I always appreciate for knowedgeable advice as well.

[headhasthoughts]

It wasn't elaborated on because it wasn't part of the core point of the comment, which was someone claiming falsely that to write Common Lisp you needed to use CLOS, which you absolutely don't.

You wouldn't go into why JavaScript is bad to point out that you don't need to write JavaScript to make a web page. You would just note that JavaScript was a late addition to the web and wasn't the first language usable on it.

Plenty of people were writing CL before CLOS existed.

[zasdffaa]

Then "You absolutely can use it without CLOS" would have sufficed.

You opined in addition on the quality of clos. That could have been very useful if you'd explained it.

[Blackthorn]

I don't know what their own thoughts on it are, but I personally think it's poorly bolted on because it's not actually used by the rest of the spec. There's a massive proliferation of functions acting on data structures, and none of them are generic even if they do the same thing. Poorly bolted on indeed.

[Jtsummers]

CL's functionality is an amalgamation of the prior Lisps (thus "Common") which didn't have CLOS. But it was CLOS-ifying a variety of things by the time of the 1994 standard. You just don't see more because the immediate goal was a large degree of compatibility with those prior Lisps. If a second standard had developed a larger portion of the system would probably have been brought under CLOS.

[pfdietz]

This is a valid criticism. Many of the (possibly) non-generic functions in Common Lisp could be made generic. That they weren't was a bow to existing implementations of Lisp that wouldn't have supported it. The stakeholders engaging in the standardization process didn't want extensions that would be excessively (at the time) costly for them to implement, especially in a way that wouldn't have a large runtime performance impact.

[dreamcompiler]

The CL error system is built with CLOS. If you want to customize error handling you'll basically be writing CLOS.

But I agree about general data structures. Some of the sequence functions are generic but not enough of them. I presume this happened because circa 1990 generic dispatch was too slow to handle high speed data traversal. That's no longer true, and many libraries exist to "generify" more of Common Lisp.

[zasdffaa]

...and that's the sort of critique I'm interested in and which should have been given initially.