

Ugly Common Lisp Data Type Questions - brewski
http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/citaa/ten_ugly_lisp_data_type_questions/

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KirinDave
These questions are good, but there's something important to remember before
drawing any real conclusions about common lisp: The spec is older than some
few readers here at this site. Most useful programs deviate significantly from
the spec in order to deliver features that modern systems consider essential
but were not of tremendous import back when the spec was solidified.

So yeah, Common Lisp (the spec) has a lot of weird warts, compromises, and
holes. That's why modern lisps like Clojure, Nu, Racket and the like are so
exciting: they're taking a set of very good ideas and moving them into our
modern 2010 network-driven-high-throughput-SIMD-demanding cloud-computing-era.
The syntax and the semantics of syntax manipulation coupled with procedure-
oriented programming are a powerful cocktail that was only briefly given the
popularity it deserves in our software engineering culture.

~~~
tjr
Yes, good and fair questions. Indeed, Common Lisp isn't flawless or beautiful
in every respect, and Steele would surely admit that himself. The Lisp concept
is pretty beautiful, and CL, for better or worse, has been more ubituitous
than most other dialects of Lisp.

When I hear people (including myself) wax eloquent about the beauty of Lisp,
even Common Lisp in particular, I don't take that to mean that every detail of
the design is beautiful, but rather, the whole of Lisp / Common Lisp is a
beautiful programming system. I can look out my office window here and see a
beautiful tree, though I know upon closer inspection I could find some flaws
and imperfections in the tree. Perhaps a branch has broken off, or maybe an
animal has gnawed away at some bark. That doesn't do away with its overarching
beauty.

~~~
KirinDave
Right.

And there are features in common lisp that I really want to see escape into
mainstream. Condition and signal handling, in particular, is an amazing thing
that almost no language has a good answer to.

~~~
tomjen3
Yeah, I do hope they add conditions and restarts to C#5 (or any language that
people will pay me to use).

