(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.)

Why is on-boarding new developers so difficult? For instance, why isn’t Roswell linked to from every About Common Lisp page?

Baggers

Warning: Very much my own opinion

• CL is enjoyable to learn with a good environment
• Emacs/Vim are the only places with good environments
• Learning Emacs/Vim and CL at the same is super hard

When atom-slime is stable I'll defintely try using that to teach people but currently (last checked 1 month ago) it's way too unstable. Please don't recommend it yet.

Roswell isnt recommended by most as most people don't use it. I'm certainly in that camp too, once I had a way of getting set up that was simple I stopped looking for other ways to do it (I made a youtube video on this process which has been fairly popular).

Also teaching is hard and the longer it has been since you struggled, the harder is can be to recall what made things difficult. The 'churn' of people in the community feels low and so it seems that many of the people around have been in for a very long time.

dzecniv

I'm not sure the community is aware of this difficulty. I hope that the CL Cookbook help in fixing that.

For me the difficulty was not about Emacs that I was familiar with, but the extreme lack of good, up to date and enjoyable resources. Do you imagine that many projects don't even have documentation (uiop points to its sources, series...), don't even have syntax highlighting for lisp snippets (common-lisp.net), is old and clunky (CLHS), that lots of stuff doesn't point to modern tools (all the old books) or is outdated? :( Hopefully we'll keep on counting on the cl-cookbook and the awesome-list, which have quite improved lately.

KDallas_Multipass

I would say that there are more books that provide value to the CL community in spite of being old than there are books that are way outdated, due I think largely to the lack of change in the standard. I too thought that the CLHS seemed clunky, and there are parts of it that I don't understand, but for the most part when I need it I put my cursor over a symbol and get the clhs page on the symbol and I'm good to go. It took me a while to find the section where loop's semantics are explained rather than just the grammar, and I go back to that a lot. I imagine there are other such references that I haven't found yet. Regarding up-to-date resources, I found PCL to be a great start, it shows you how to get real stuff done. The only thing that might be out of date is the practical about parsing mp3's and streaming them, and thats only because I have a hard time believing that people have libraries of mp3's sitting around anymore, or maybe thats just me. I also recommend Edi Weitz' cookbook for an example of more modern excursions, esp w.r.t. the section on concurrency, where he walks through using a library that lets you specify a graph of computation steps, allowing concurrent operations to proceed when called for, and synchronizing when necessary.

Aidenn0

Roswell didn't exist when many of the "About Common Lisp" pages were written. There are probably still some pages out there that mention "asdf-install" which is a failed precursor to Quicklisp.

Also, many of the advantages of Lisp development are in the IDE and tooling. This means Emacs if you want something stable. People say "I just want to program in lisp, not learn a whole new editor." This is a framing problem I think, because nobody complained about firing up TurboPascal for Pascal programming.

cannabis_detox

For people who feel they are great programmers and are just switching languages: PCL was designed for this purpose.

I can't speak for those guys. I was shit when I started lisp. I had used a lot of languages. I had made a lot of money off of software that I had written. After all, good code has nothing to do with good software. But I knew I was shit, programming was just way too hard. So I'm gonna talk about the people who were like me when I started out, and why they would hate and more importantly struggle to use lisp.

As I've alluded, I've been on my Lisp journey for a couple of years and I've gone from knowing nothing about lisp to the point where I can actually argue why I want to use lisp instead of languages like c# or python. To me this issue is pretty simple. Lisp's lack of popularity makes it much more difficult to glue things together in order to create software. You can do it, but it pales in comparison to how easy it is to do in Python, which is the best at this in my experience. If I want to write a program in python, I can google how to do it and you bet your ass there will be a library that already does everything I want to do (and more). In addition, I'll see at least 2 stack overflow questions on "how to do x". I'm not saying you can't glue things together in lisp, you absolutely can, and I think lisp actually simplifes so many things, but there is undeniably so much more in your way if you're a newb just trying to make something.

Let's get concrete! Lisp's standard library (despite being massive) does not provide you with enough to make a basic application just by gluing some high level functions together. Heck, even writing a file is a fucking mess. (defun write-file (file string)) pls. Imagine you know the filename and what you want to put in the file. That should be enough. Nope. You've gotta copy paste this mess that has something to do with something called a stream (whatever the fuck that is). Manipulating strings? Forget it! (regular expressions?! Now we have 2 problems! Lisp doesn't support regex out of the box? Make that 3 problems!) I haven't even mentioned the parenthesis. Programming lisp without rainbow parentheses is a surefire way to give up on it. If you are not a proficient programmer (ie the way I was before I learned how to apply recursion. ty little lisper), rolling your own functions to do string manipulation is a huge vacuum of your time and energy for something that you feel should already be there. Of course, once you understand how to program, it's easy to roll your own, and honestly when it comes to text, I've been thinking about it all my life, I don't need to reinvent how I think about it. I just need the computer to understand me. So if anything, I'd rather have my own functions that match my thought process instead of trying to reshape my mind to conform to regular expressions or the standard way of manipulating strings that everyone uses so you have to too. Lisp is so much about getting the computer to come to you instead of the other way around. But this is pointless when you're just trying to make something. When you're new and you're just trying to make something, it just feels like, "Why isn't this here? Doesn't everyone have to use strings? Why hasn't someone added this shit yet?" It's so frustrating that the only way someone is really going to put up with all that is if they really believe there's a payoff in the long term. Luckily, there is. Lisp rewards deep study. For example let's look at code substitution. Code substitution is great. It allows you to choose your inputs which is a very poweful thing. However, code substitution where your code is in a stupid simple data structure and you have a huge library dedicated to using that data structure, well that's not great, that's fucking beautiful. But you don't learn that in the same day. You learn about code substitution. You learn about manipulating lists. You realize that your code is a list (multiple times). And piece by piece it all comes together and you can start to see the tapestry those smug lispers wouldn't shut up about. It's fucking beautiful but it's not something you get any value out of when you're first starting out and just trying to make something. Lisp also requires blind faith and trust. You will benefit immensely from suspending belief, doing things the lisp way, and asking why do lispers do things this way. Why do we use let? There must be a good reason. Use it. Ask why. Trust that there's a smart reason for doing so. There is. And if you can't find a good reason, great! You're using lisp, do it your way instead. You're not forced to do things the lisp way. And I didn't even talk about development environments. There's just too much there, but basically it's another one of those long term rewards. I wrote my own toy IDE with LTK in ~30 lines of code that I didn't even realize could update itself in real time. So it's not even about learning EMACS SLIME. The language itself makes it easy to make really great development environments. And when you think about it, shouldn't every language? But when you're new who cares. just give me the IDE. Give me the libraries I need. Let me make my application. And suddenly all of these "features" I bragged about just stand in your way. None of that talk about beauty and reward matters to a gal who just wants to automatically download new episodes of one piece. The only thing she's thinking is why is this shit so pointlessly complicated and difficult. Even if you were to fix all of the problems I mentioned, you still can't compete with googling "how do i do x in python".

blue-dog-blues

My journey was a little bit different. I have always loved computing history read up on the exploits of ancient engineers as much as I can. Out of that reading I came to appreciate the following:

• The beauty of the Lisp programming language.
• The beauty of the APL programming language.
• Just how unbeleivably smart the designers of Lisp and APL were. We are not talking normal smart here. We are talking 100 years ahead of the curve smart. Orders of magnitude smarter than smart people. Then consider that McCarthy and Iverson were not the only intellects of that caliber in the computing field in the 50s 60s and 70s. Computer science was bloody full of them!
• Just how large of a canyon separates the everyday smart people in comp sci from the true geniuses like McCarthy and Iverse et al. Holy crap. Watching the smart re-invent over and over again some random subset of ideas already inventet so long ago is truly a thing to behold. It's eye watering.
• Just how little we have progressed. Computer science has not really progressed much in the last 30 years. Most of the fruits of computer science that we use today were invented in the 50s 60s and 70s. All we do now is more of it and faster. Instead, to make sure the hardware folks get the well deserved spotlight, all of the innovation seems to have gone to hardware (not just better, faster, smaller and more of the same BUT new as well!).

So, for every complaint about Lisp my mind just scrolls back to any of intellectual giants of the past in the field of computer science and thank my lucky stars I was born after them to be able to enjoy the fruits of the genius. Because, what would programming look like without McCarthy? Would someone else invent Lisp or APL without them?

I think the world would be exactly as it is today, only a little bit poorer becasue we would probably only have a subset of the ideas discovered by these people. Everyone would be programming in some language that is essentially a cobbled together hot pile of garbage ALMOST ALWAYS containing only a subset of the ideas expressed in Lisp. A language invented 50 years ago for crying out loud.

The resulting conclusion though is that, there are truly two different demographics exploring Lisp:

• The pragmatist - need to deliver a real product yesterday, don't have time for bullshit, gotta pay some bills. Real world economics rules the day, real programmers deliver product.
• The admirer - real world economics either don't matter or have bypassed us and we spend our time in magical fields sown for us FOR FREE by giants that are either long gone or slowly passing away.

I preffer the latter than the former, perhaps one day we will manage the economics side of things to make a pragmattic Lisp experience have a lower barrier to entry.

Lastly, I never look down on the pragmatist. They have delivered 99.9% of the worlds code, not us. I am just glad I don't have to suffer their toil. Lisp makes it fun.

phoe

The documentation and materials are scattered and not that easy to find. I'm trying to fix that with the UltraSpec.

Why hasn’t the Common Lisp Foundation updated the common-lisp.net home page since 2015?

phoe

I have no idea. The Foundation has been alive in general, but it seems thay have other priorities than that. Why don't you ask them? #common-lisp.net @ Freenode. EDIT: The website has been updated in 2018.