[ArtixFox]

Common Lisp is an amalgamation of every lisp they could find, they slammed it all in. Calling it well designed is funny because every single CL developer openly accepts that its a fucking weird language with hell lot of warts that cannot be polished away.

Ada is fine, just verbose, kinda fun, no comments about it except that its kinda sad how weak their formal verification is. I prefer Frama-C over it. You can compare Ada and rust but ada is horrible, sincerely horrible at working with ownership. Frama-C can run laps around it as you can verify EVEN arbitrary pointer arithmetic.

Calling rust a horrible abomination is weird. As someone who dabbled in CL for an year, I love the fact that it has proc macros and even tho its harder to use it, i can make my own DSLs and make buildtime compilers!!

That opens up a world of possibilities.We can actually have safer and stricter math libraries! Maybe put us back in era of non-electron applications?

The horrible part might be syntax but eh, its a stupid thing to care about.

[kazinator]

CK standardization was before my Lisp time, but from the historical accounts that I read about, many people in the Lisp world were unhappy because Common Lisp didn't have this or that from whatever they were working on, and because CL was standard they would have to use it.

CL is fairly carefully designed with regards to compiling. This is why math functions are not generic for instance. Redefining standard functions is undefined behavior, as a self-modifying code. It omits features that don't integrate well with conventional run time and machine models like continuations. It doesn't even require implementations to optimize tail calls.

I have no idea why ANSI CL has such a large page count. In my mind it's such a small language. I think it could have benefited from an editorial pass to get it down to 600-something pages. But that would have delayed it even longer.

Once the horse escapes the barn it's risky. When you rewrite technical text you can very easily change the meaning of something, or take a particular interpretation where multiple are possible and such.

[lispm]

> many people in the Lisp world were unhappy because Common Lisp didn't have this or that from whatever they were working on, and because CL was standard they would have to use it.

There were many unhappy, but from very different camps. Some were unhappy (for example people in the small Standard Lisp camp) because Common Lisp was not dynamic enough (it has features of static compilation, no fexprs, ...). Others were unhappy because it was too dynamic and difficult to compile to efficient code on small machines with stock CPUs. Some complained that it was too large and hard to fit onto some of the tiny machines of that time. Others complained that it was too small and lacked critical features from larger Lisp implementations (like stack groups, threads, a fully integrated object system, the first version had no useful error handling, gui functionality, extensible streams, ...).

Many more users/implementors from other Lisp dialects were unhappy, because it was clear that their favorite Lisp dialect would slowly fade away - funding was going away, new users would avoid it, existing users would port their code away, ...

> This is why math functions are not generic for instance

The math functions are generic (they work for several types). But there was no machinery behind that specified. They were not generic in the sense of CLOS generic functions (or similar). Also because with CLtL1 there was no such machinery in the language, but there are (non-extensible) generic numeric functions. CLOS later added a machinery for generic functions, but there was no experience to create optimized&fast code for it. The way of a CLtL1 Lisp implementation for fast numeric functions was to specify types and let a compiler generate type specific (non-generic) code. ANSI CL left the language in that state: the generic numeric functions were not implemented by CLOS, similar to so much in the language specification avoids further integration of CLOS and leaves it to implementations to decide how to implement them: I/O, condition handling, ...

> I have no idea why ANSI CL has such a large page count.

It was supposed to be a language specification for industrial users with detailed infos. There were standard templates how to specify a function, macro, ...

The Scheme reports OTOH were made to have the smallest page count possible with 2 columns of text, leaving out much of the detail of a real language spec. Why? Because it was material for a teaching language and thus was supposed to be read by students learning the language in a semester course at the university. Thus R5RS specified a teaching language, just barely, not as a full application programming language (for example it has zero error handling and basic things were just barely specified in its behavior and implementation).

[lispm]

> Common Lisp is an amalgamation of every lisp they could find, they slammed it all in.

Not really. It's mostly a modernized version of Zetalisp. In many cases simpler as that, with some added new stuff (like type declarations).

[f1shy]

> Common Lisp is an amalgamation of every lisp they could find, they slammed it all in.

Absolutely NO. Take a look to the book by Guy Steel, and you will see is not like that.