
Common Lisp Koans - galois198
https://github.com/google/lisp-koans
======
ihuman
I'm surprised to see that this is on Google's Github page. Do they have any
projects (besides this) that use Common Lisp?

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chaitanya
They bought ITA Software a few years ago, which largely used Common Lisp.

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bch
And additionally employ Peter Norvig[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig)

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sdfin
Is there any reason today to study Common Lisp instead of a more popular and
evolving Lisp, like Clojure or Racket?

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mapcars
btw, your question assumes that Common Lisp is not evolving. This is not
correct at all. Which improvements Clojure evolving consists of? Transducers?
Cl got them too:
[https://github.com/aamedina/transducers](https://github.com/aamedina/transducers)
Transactional memory? [http://stmx.org/](http://stmx.org/) ClojureScript?
[http://davazp.net/jscl/jscl.html](http://davazp.net/jscl/jscl.html)

These are only infrastructure things, Common Lisp has language features which
are just impossible in Clojure while it based on JVM.

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coldtea
> _btw, your question assumes that Common Lisp is not evolving. This is not
> correct at all. Which improvements Clojure evolving consists of?_

Traction for one.

> _Transducers? Cl got them too_

Pointing to some random libs that implement the same concept doesn't mean it's
part of a languages culture/ecosystem/common practice as transducers are to
closure.

E.g. I could say "Rails? Well, language X has a rails like framework too", but
that wouldn't mean you get the same benefits of using that framework over
rails, when you include language adoption, community vibrancy, availability of
programmers to hire, tooling, books, etc.

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mapcars
They should not be a part of language, what for?

Everything else you mentioned is about community only, and doesn't apply
directly to the language.

E.g. if you have a good language without a community, community can eventually
grow, but you can use the language anyway.

If you have a bad language with great community - it doesn't reduce your
suffering from the language itself.

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coldtea
> _E.g. if you have a good language without a community, community can
> eventually grow, but you can use the language anyway. If you have a bad
> language with great community - it doesn 't reduce your suffering from the
> language itself._

My experience has been the inverse.

I'd rather use a bad, or usually mediocre language WITH community, tooling,
libs, books, programmers etc, than a better one where I'll be burdened by the
lack of all of these.

So, in a sense, community tramps inherent language qualities.

After all that's the very basic message from Lisp and Smalltalk.

