How to write Common Lisp in 2017 – an initiation manual

Re:How to write Common Lisp in 2017 – an initiation manual by 0xcde4c3db on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @10:49PM (#13982936)

Not speaking for hydandata, a few key points of CL as opposed to Clojure (which might be advantages or disadvantages depending on context and preference) include:

- Defined by a standard (the text of the standard is available for free online as the Common Lisp HyperSpec [1]), not by a reference implementation led by a BDFL

- Multiple mature implementations, both free and proprietary

- Wholeheartedly multi-paradigm; has FP features, but also provides plenty of tools for imperative (notably including a powerful macro for loops) and (meta)object-oriented approaches

- "Lisp-2" rather than "Lisp-1"; functions and variables are in different namespaces, which reduces name clashes but requires disambiguation in some places

- Designed for implementation in a wide variety of environments, including being embedded as an extension/scripting language in C or C++ applications (see ECL [2])

[1] http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index...

[2] https://common-lisp.net/project/ecl/

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Re:How to write Common Lisp in 2017 – an initiation manual by kakapupu on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @01:55AM (#13983780)

> Defined by a standard

How does this help, compared to Clojure?

> Multiple mature implementations

Why wouldn't one free mature implementation be good enough?

> Wholeheartedly multi-paradigm

Exactly like Clojure.

> "Lisp-2" rather than "Lisp-1"

I can't remember which one Clojure is :) But I haven't had any problems with namespaces and the like.

> Designed for implementation in a wide variety of environments

So is Clojure, right? There's the CLR version, and ClojureScript too.

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Re:How to write Common Lisp in 2017 – an initiation manual by lispm on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @02:57AM (#13984011)

Clojure variants are incompatible in various basic ways, since they use the host language for various things. The underlying platform also restricts what the implementation provides. No TCO in JVM -> no TCO in Clojure. Numbers are internally floats in Javascript -> Numbers are internally floats in ClojureScript and use Javascript semantics, not Clojure-Semantics.

Clojure:

  Clojure 1.8.0
  user=> (/ 3 4)
  3/4

ClojureScript

  cljs.user=> (/ 3 4)
  0.75

Looks like these are different languages...

Common Lisp implementations OTOH implement most of the standard. There is also more choice in implementations:

* native implementations AND hosted implementations

* actual Lisp interpreters or a mix of interpreters and compilers, interactive compilers, batch compiler

* compilers written in Lisp itself with good error messages, forms of compile-time type checking/inference, and advanced error handling (like SBCL, CMUCL)

* compilation to C, full embedding into C programs (ECL and others)

* full embedding in C++ (CLASP)

* compilation to shared libraries, embeddable into other applications

* whole program compilers for delivery of compact applications (like mocl)

The main Clojure compiler is written in Java and it shows...

https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/jvm/cloju...

If one targets a certain host environment (JVM, Javascript, ...) then this range of options and choice might not matter, even hinder - besides getting a poorer version of interactivity.

If we see a Lisp as a language on its own, then it matters a lot.

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Re:How to write Common Lisp in 2017 – an initiation manual by azrazalea on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @11:17AM (#13987073)

> > Wholeheartedly multi-paradigm

> Exactly like Clojure.

Clojure is definitively not multi-paradigm. The only blessed by the developers/community paradigm is functional.

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