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by iLemming 528 days ago
> myriad reasons why Common Lisp is far superior to Clojure

Some narrow view. Have you tried thinking that maybe Clojure intentionally chose not to include type declarations because they can lead to a messy middle ground? After all, maybe not every feature from Common Lisp needs to be replicated in every Lisp dialect? Besides, Clojure's Spec and Malli can be far more powerful for validation as they can define complex data structures, you can generate test data from them, you can validate entire system states, and they can be manipulated as data themselves.

If CL so "far superior" like you say, why then it can't be 'hosted' like Clojure? Why Clojure has Clojurescript, ClojureCLR, ClojureDart, babashka, nbb, sci, etc.? I'm not saying that to argue your specific point. Neither of them is 'superior' to another. They both have different purposes, philosophies, and use cases. Each has its strengths, pros, and cons. And that is actually very cool.
1 comments
lispm 528 days ago
> not to include type declarations because they can lead to a messy middle ground?

What? Type declarations in CL (which came from prior Lisp dialects) were added, so that optimizing Lisp compilers can use those to create fast machine code on typical CPUs (various CISC and RISC processors). Several optimizing compilers have been written, taking advantage of that feature. The compiler of SBCL would be an example. SBCL (and CMUCL before that) also uses type declarations as assertions. So, both the SBCL runtime and the SBCL compiler use type declarations.

> why then it can't be 'hosted' like Clojure?

ABCL does not exist?

https://abcl.org

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draven 528 days ago
> ABCL does not exist?

I've only played with Clojure (not used it professionally, I'm working with Scala) but Clojure interop with Java is way better than what I can see here: https://abcl.org/doc/abcl-user.html The way it's integrated with the host platform makes it better for most use cases IMHO.

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lispm 528 days ago
> The way it's integrated with the host platform makes it better for most use cases IMHO.

That may be. ABCL is running on the host system and can reuse it, but it aims to be a full implementation of Common Lisp, not a blend of a subset of Lisp plus the host runtime. For example one would expect the full Common Lisp numerics.

One of its purposes is to be able to run portable Common Lisp code on the JVM. Like Maxima or like bootstrapping the SBCL system.

There is a bit more about the interop in the repository and in the manual:

https://abcl.org/releases/1.9.2/abcl-1.9.2.pdf

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iLemming 528 days ago
I didn't say "type declarations can lead to a messy middle ground in Common Lisp" - obviously they exist there for a reason, but, maybe they DON'T exist in Clojure, also for good reasons, no?

ABCL does exist, sure, and there's also LCL for Lua. Yet, 8 out of 10 developers today, for whatever reasons would probably use Fennel to write Lispy-code to target Lua and probably more devs would choose Clojure (not ABCL) to target JVM. That doesn't make either Fennel nor Clojure "far superior" than Common Lisp and vice-versa.

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lispm 528 days ago
> I didn't say "type declarations can lead to a messy middle ground in Common Lisp" - obviously they exist there for a reason, but, maybe they DON'T exist in Clojure, also for good reasons, no?

What were those reasons?

> ABCL does exist, sure,

Would that count as a hosted implementation?

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