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by rusakov-field 99 days ago
As someone who fell in love with Lisp with Scheme and SICP, I think I agree with the push for minimalism and a bit dubious about the changes in Lisp-2 ...

Is that only a recency bias ? Because I learned Scheme first ? When I try CL I find my mind resisting some things due to purely elegance reasons.

If someone put a gun to my head and asked me for a deliverable quickly I will go with CL to save my life of course, but for my own personal pleasure I will always prefer Scheme.
1 comments
tmtvl 99 days ago
As someone who also first got introduced to Lisp through SICP and Scheme, I don't really care about Lisp-1 versus Lisp-2, but I don't much fancy minimalism. I switched to CL for the type declarations and just got used to funcall and number sign+apostrophe; and minimalism means the things a larger language would provide out of the box (say, hash tables) you either need to write yourself or find a library for. Hence why various Schemes (Guile, Gauche, Chicken) have a ton of libraries beyond the standard.

In fact, I'd say CL is too minimalist, hence CLDR (a bit like SRFIs) and various libraries which form a sort of unofficial extended core (Alexandria, Bordeaux threads, CL-PPCRE,...)

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sl_convertible 98 days ago
But there's a value in having a defined, stable language definition. Being able to rely on the basic language not changing is a feature, not a bug. Though it does mean you have to sometimes search for a good lib if you don't have a feature built into the language.
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tmtvl 98 days ago
Did you respond to the wrong comment?

My comment said nothing about language permanence, though I would say that some measure of evolution can sometimes be for the better. I doubt many people would prefer programming in Java 1.4 over Java 21.

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