The came young students who had access to a brand new Lisp Machine in the MIT AI Lab (thanks to the welcoming spirit of Marvin Minsky and others). They implemented EINE (EINE is not Emacs) and ZWEI (ZWEI was EINE initially) and then Zmacs. -> Weinreb and McMahon. Bernard Greenberg wrote an Emacs in Maclisp for Multics. Hemlock was written in Spice Lisp. From then on a bunch of editors were written in Lisp.
Don't let you be discouraged. Learning to write well architectured programs is best done by writing programs.
I applaud those who put their thoughts between nested parentheses and turn them into working code...
> Don't let you be discouraged. > Learning to write well architectured programs is best done by writing programs. > I applaud those who put their thoughts between nested parentheses and turn them into working code...
We should appreciate jobs like lem! They are trying, thinking! And this HN section??? JUST COMPLAINING! What are you doing for helping? WTF.
Lemonodor-fame is but a hack away!
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I'm pretty sure all of that does not translate in me not telling you anything.
One can get very far with it, but for some the combination of above is enough reason to look for alternatives.
Corporations and small teams sometimes create software that is more cohesive and might be what you’re looking for, but this has never happened for a “community” of any reasonable size.
One of the biggest things holding Linux behind today is the lack of a common vision. I think it’s no coincidence that Linux on the desktop really took hold only after Canonical started promoting Ubuntu. With Cqnonical retreating into the server space and basically abandoning desktops, I fear we are about to enter another era of Linux desktop stagnation at a time when arguably we need it most (OSX and Windows are increasingly becoming tied down, and the fastest growing OS is ChromeOS which isn’t just tied down but is also potentially a privacy nightmare).
Competition and a common vision don’t need to be mutually exclusive.
look at the context. its easy to understand in todays environment why someone would write a somewhat-finished personal project, put it on github, and try to get it noticed. personal itch, self-teaching, self-marketing, etc
whats less clear is how you get together enough time and bodies to spend the substantial effort to make something well documented, tested, and more broadly useful. especially in a lesser-used language.
open source has definitely 'won', but i dont think that issue has been adequately tackled. the story seems to be that you get to step #1, and get enough traction that you can hopefully build a functioning set of contributors.
[as aside lisp also has a reputation, unfounded or not, for encouraging people to develop a bespoke private universe thats hard for other people to get a handle on]
Why we should support this type of software and attitude? There is something wrong with it.
This is the Lisp Curse:
http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html#mai...
A question I'd really like to find the answer to: Why is there so much crapware for CL?. Why doesn't the community come together behind the few, really good, libraries but instead almost everyone goes out and does his own thing, the end result being an ocean of crap.
[1] https://portacle.github.io/