
Before you start learning Lisp... - fogus
http://abhishek.geek.nz/docs/lisp-answers/
======
jacquesm
From the article:

> This is because the Lisp standard tries to specify a portable language, not
> a library.

> Note that even the C language doesn't include these things.

That's true, but the POSIX standard library functions are packaged with almost
any C environment except for embedded systems and is usually available 'out of
the box'.

Of course there is a clear distinction between what is part of the language
and what is part of the library.

Is there an equivalent to so say 'stdlib' in the LISP world ?

~~~
aerique
Not for Common Lisp (CL), but a lot of what's in 'stdlib' for C is already in
CL. Also a lot of implementations come with substantial extras, like f.e.
sockets, that the article mentioned are not in the CL standard.

Incompatibilities in those extras between implementations are handled by meta-
packages (libraries or modules in other programming languages) provided by the
community.

------
arithmetic
Should be titled "Before you start learning Common Lisp". Anyone with a
reasonable functional programming background would know the difference.

~~~
varjag
See the last point in the write-up.

------
garnet7
I'm interested in learning Scheme, and keeping my fingers crossed that they
can come together and specify some kind of "batteries-included" standard
library. Otherwise, I'm afraid I'll only be able to fiddle with Scheme for an
hour or two on weekends and get my real work done with one of the "popular"
languages (i.e., Perl, Python, etc.).

Yes, I realize PLT has some batteries included but I'd prefer a community
standard rather than a one-distro standard (not that I think (or even have
much of an idea if) anything is wrong with PLT).

~~~
mgreenbe
Your fingers are going to be crossed for a long time. I think the Steering
Committee has too many divergent interests on it for there ever to be
agreement on a serious standard library. Schemers are very DIY; for example,
see [http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-
adware...](http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-adware-
author). Rolling your own libraries on top of a tiny implementation is not
particularly uncommon. (I just hope you can write more, uh, ethical software
than that guy!)

PLT has the most batteries of any distro I've ever seen (disclaimer: one of
its authors was my undergrad advisor). That is, PLT is (a) free, (b) mature,
and (c) has a fair number of modules written by people other than the
developers of the language.

There's no sense in waiting, just dive in. If you don't want to use PLT,
Bigloo can call Java libraries---solving your battery problem in a different
way.

~~~
garnet7
> Your fingers are going to be crossed for a long time.

Hm. That's going to make it very difficult to type.

> I think the Steering Committee has too many divergent interests on it for
> there ever to be agreement on a serious standard library.

That would be most unfortunate.

> Schemers are very DIY; for example, see [snip]

Not sure what about that story points to Schemers being particularly DIY.
Sounds like the fellow needed something tiny, so rather than take a full-blown
batteries-included language and strip out what he didn't need, he instead just
used something small that he was familiar with.

> There's no sense in waiting, just dive in.

Yeah. Trying to make the time... thanks for the encouragement. :)

------
kiba
Does anybody have a good elsip project idea?

I been trying to learn elisp but I didn't have good enough excuses to write
anything in elisp.

~~~
mapleoin
write a hacker news reader so I won't have to exit emacs for that.

~~~
keyist
HN is pretty usable in w3m / emacs-w3m.

To log in you will have to patch your w3m to send "Content-Length" instead of
"Content-length" (see <http://arclanguage.org/item?id=4419> )

------
tocomment
why does it say LISP isn't a functional programming language but Clojure is?
Isn't Clojure a dialect of Lisp?

~~~
astine
The author forgets to specify, but he is talking about Common Lisp, not Lisp
in general.

~~~
frossie
_While we're at it, the name "LISP" is obsolete. It's reminiscent of variants
of the broader lisp family of languages, circa 1980. We're talking about
Common Lisp instead, often shortened to "Lisp", being a much more modern
language."_

(Unless the author added that after the OP was submitted)

~~~
astine
I'm sorry, I mistated, the author forgat to specify what he meant by 'Lisp'
_before_ writting a page and a half on it. He did get around to it near the
end of the article when all of the laypeople left confused about Lisp.

~~~
arb
I've added a note at the top disambiguating the term too. Thanks for the
feedback. :-)

