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      Answers from 2017 Common Lisp experts - Table of Contents

      Michał "phoe" Herda · Sunday, 23 December, 2018 - 11:30 edit · 3 minutes

    (This is a repost of an old blog post of mine from Teknik. This blog post was split into multiple parts to accomodate for Movim's size limitations; use hypelinks in the table of contents to navigate.)

    This post is a compilation of answers to the questions posted in a blog post titled Questions for 2017 Common Lisp experts, posted by anticrisis.

    I have decided that the questions asked in that post are good enough to deserve a response post that gathers the collective knowledge of the Lisp community in a FAQ of sorts.

    It's somewhat baffling to say that "experts", whoever they are, have gathered to respond to this question - I simply assume that the people who have voiced their opinion on the topic - regardless of who they are - know what they are talking of, and therefore their comments should be, and have been, included here.

    This post includes answers shamelessly scavenged from the reddit thread discussing these comments along with answers that I was able to collect from other places and people - to be precise #lisp @ Freenode and the Lisp Discord server.

    The responses were slightly edited where necessary to add context, punctuation and capitals; I am to blame for all unintended changes to meaning that it might have caused. On the other hand, even if the answers were mostly duplicating each other, I have decided to keep them all; I do not want to editorialize here, but instead try to (perhaps a bit experimentally) show the inner workings of the Lisp community's hivemind and outline the questions that are perhaps the most controversial and eliciting mixed views and responses among the community. (Why? Because I can.)

    This post also includes my own answers mixed in between all others.


    Libraries

    • Why don’t libraries have version numbers?
    • Why is adding libraries to Quicklisp a manual process that requires human review? Is there an alternative non-curated registry?
    • Why aren’t ASDF dependencies automatically fetched if missing?
    • Why do so few libraries use GitHub?

    Open source

    • Are there serious open source efforts to modernize documentation?
    • Are there serious open source efforts to modernize libraries?
    • Are there efforts to encourage open source contributions?
    • My apologies, but I’d never even heard of GitLab prior to seeing all these libraries hosted on common-lisp.net. Why not GitHub?

    Compilers

    • Why hasn’t the open source community standardized on a single implementation, i.e. SBCL?
    • Would there be any benefit to extending SBCL beyond the Common Lisp standard to better support modern language features and paradigms?

    Functional programming

    • Why aren’t there more libraries using a functional, immutable paradigm? Most seem to use many dynamic variables and large functions spanning multiple screens, with variables mutating throughout
    • Are there any functional programming advocates in the Common Lisp open source community?

    Innovation

    • Are there any efforts to bring innovative libraries from the Clojure (or elsewhere) community into Common Lisp?
    • Is there software design innovation occurring in the Common Lisp community or is the community primarily focused on maintenance and tuning?
    • Is it worth the time and energy to develop new libraries to modernize Common Lisp – or perhaps a single extended implementation of it, like SBCL – or would that time and energy be more productively spent in a non-Common Lisp community?

    Onboarding

    • Why is on-boarding new developers so difficult? For instance, why isn’t Roswell linked to from every About Common Lisp page?
    • Why hasn’t the Common Lisp Foundation updated the common-lisp.net home page since 2015?

    Community

    • Why are there so few instructional or advocacy bloggers?
    • Why can’t Google search find many good resources? I.e. a search for “Common Lisp” is not that helpful.

    More links for newbies:

    If you'd like your own answers to be included here, give me a hint on email.

    The comments have been scraped and posted here in good will; they belong to their authors and I'll remove any of them the moment I hear from the author that they should be removed.