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by davidpapermill 19 days ago
This is well-written.

I always thought that the "answer" to programming would be that one day everyone would use Lisp and with awesome tooling and libraries things would be wonderful. In fact, my plan for retirement was to build high-quality libraries for a Lisp language to accelerate this process.

Does the rise of AI bring an end to this dream? Is that, once again, we have solved the problem by adding more cruft? Rather than a superintelligent AI writing in the best programming language available, we're going to just spam lots of Python code until it works?

Does this matter? I don't know, I just wanted a world of elegance.
2 comments
WillAdams 19 days ago
I've always wondered what would have happened if the first "Interface Builder"

>Jean-Marie Hullot created "SOS Interface" in Lisp for the Macintosh while working at INRIA (1984) which was the first modern "interface builder."

https://denninginstitute.com/itcore/userinterface/GUIHistory...

had become a mainstream Mac product rather than being co-opted for NeXT and use w/ Objective-C.

LISP clicked with me (when taking a comparative language class in college I was the only one who managed to do all of the LISP homework) and learning it was a lot of help in using TeX.

I just wish that there was:

- a nice native or cross-platform GUI toolkit for it which was opensource

- an easy way to distribute projects as stand-alone compiled code

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anthk 18 days ago
GUI: MCClim, but it's a bit rusty/Motif like/Tk Life.

Deploy: SBCL can build standalone binaries I think.

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WillAdams 18 days ago
If SBCL can build stand-alone binaries using MCClim, I know what my next personal project will be.
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anthk 18 days ago
Get Quicklisp and after that, Ultralisp because the last CLX library it's much faster even on shitty computers las my n270 netbook. Under ECL it almost ran without lag (just a slight one), and with SBCL it was almost as fast as Tk under TCL.
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doug_durham 18 days ago
Languages are never the answer. Lisp isn't superior to Visual Basic. They are both Turing complete. Humans can express good ideas in each. It's better to think of languages as tools. An impact drill is not superior to a simple rotary drill. You will have better luck building a deck with an impact drill, but both will do the job.
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