

Lisp for the 21st Century - dpapathanasiou
http://www.lambdassociates.org/lC21.htm

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jimbokun
Starter Pack is another effort that addresses some of the noted deficiencies
in Common Lisp.

<http://weitz.de/starter-pack/>

Technically, the whole project including GUI installer only works on
LispWorks. However, the selection of libraries makes a good approximation to a
CL standard library and it's not too hard to figure out how to install all of
them in SBCL or whatever other CL implementation you have. This gets you much
closer to the starting point of a "batteries included" language like Python.

If every CL implementation in the world simply bundled all of the libraries in
Starter Pack, a lot of the legitimate criticisms of CL would be solved.

(If you are one of those people who just say "too many parentheses", however,
there is no help for you.)

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amalcon
Heh... From reading the first part of this, I rather expected it to be an
implementation of a Lisp-like language (complete with first-class functions,
macros, the whole deal, maybe sans some of the bloat) on top of some other
runtime environment like Java or Python. That would give the developer the
power of Lisp with the libraries of some other language.

It quickly became apparent that it was just an attempt to "dumb down" Lisp.

Incidentally, does anyone know of a (mature) language that does the above?
Preferably derived from Scheme? I have really wanted to use this for some
time, but I've resisted implementing it myself, thinking that "Someone MUST
have done this by now..." As it happens, people have, but it's typically more
of an "I hacked this together last weekend; please don't actually use it for
anything!" type project.

~~~
amalcon
Well, go figure -- not an hour after I post this, I find Kawa:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/>

I remember finding this before, but for some reason deciding it was not what I
wanted. I can't find anything important missing, though... Cool.

~~~
brlewis
I was about to post saying you must not have looked very hard. I've been using
Kawa successfully for years. Its biggest fault is that there are so few bugs
that I'm not motivated to keep up with new releases.

There is at least one other JVM-based Scheme implementation out there, and
it's stable and well maintained too.

~~~
tuukkah
I remember looking at Bigloo a long time ago, but I haven't kept up with the
development.

~~~
brlewis
Bigloo is a Scheme compiler that supports the JVM as one of its back-end
targets.

Kawa is a JVM compiler that supports Scheme as one of its front-end languages.

SISC is an interpreter that runs on the JVM. There are other Scheme
interpeters for the JVM, but SISC is the most prominent and said to be the
fastest interpreter. In some tests it even beat the Kawa compiler.

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jimbokun
Looks like pg hurry things up with getting Arc out or Qi will beat it to
become the 21st century 100 Year Language. :)

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gibsonf1
Wow - what a great effot. I'm definitely looking forward to the 2008 version
which includes web programming.

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adnam
And #FFFFFF on #000000 for the 20th.

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jsnx
Do efforts to save Lisp just detract from the growth of functional programming
in general?

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anamax
(1) Lisp isn't (just) a functional programming language.

(2) Why should lisp advocates care about "functional programming in general"?

~~~
jsnx
I agree with (1), but most "functional" languages aren't just functional.

As for (2) -- "A rising tide lifts all boats."

