

When will we get the Future of Lisp? - jonsulred

For a few years now I've had constant flirtations with lisp. Most recently Clojure and Racket, but I'm not fully finding my place yet. At the same time I've found the most amazing programming experience and yet at the same time felt a distance from actually being able to use it professionally.<p>It may be a stupid question but is there anyone else that just wants a lisp that works like it's syntax. (get out of the way and let you work) And that has the simplicity of scheme with the power of Common Lisp. That has a nice community model that embraces newer technology than mail lists. And has a module system as pleasant to use as Python's or Haskell's. And documentation as pleasant as Python's as well now that I think about it. Something that doesn't try to push exotic theories on computer science or make a huge dramatic change on how I program and just looks around and combines what works together into a useful bundle. But mostly, where the creator doesn't abandon development and let it flip-flop every few years.<p>That's my Dream Lisp. What's yours?
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kls
I think Clojure is the closest thing to what you are looking for but the sad
part is that it is due to Java giving it a standard library with
documentation. While I am by no means a Lisp expert, I have a little
experience with Racket and am now doing some stuff (past couple of weeks) in
Clojure, I do have to say the Java library documentation is a life saver when
you are actually trying to get real work done. I think the fact that Lisp is
the king of theoretical CS type development is also it's Achilles heel. In
Lisp and academia (which make up a lot of Lisp users), a lot of people do want
to reinvent the wheel, as such some get board half way through and leave an
undocumented half implemented project in the wild. Discerning quality of third
party code is difficult and no one really wants to standardize. I would really
like to embrace CL, but it's just too much patching things of unknown quality
together in a commercial environment. I think Clojure with it's ability to
access Java libs is the best compromise for my ambitions.

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jonsulred
I thought that too, but while learning it I realized pretty quickly that to
learn Clojure you first have to learn Java. For people with Java experience
and time it probably isn't a problem, but for a non Java programmer with
little time...

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kls
I never thought about that, I took for granted my Java knowledge, thanks for
the insight.

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CyberFonic
newLISP! It might not please the CL/Scheme experts. BUT it has a very capable
API and library of modules. You can deploy it as a single 1/4MB executable. A
command line switch will turn it into a http server and already supports IPv6,
etc. check it out : www.newlisp.org

~~~
rman666
+1 for newLISP. Agreed, it will not please the purists, but I've built some
fun stuff with it (although no web apps ... that's next).

