
The nightmare of installing Lisp:  a noob's perspective - daniel-cussen
Somehow, installing Clisp on these three systems took somewhat different amounts of time.<p>Mac OS: Five weeks.  Installing macports was the worse part.  Still can't get emacs and slime together.<p>Linux:  two weeks, gave up when I got Clisp to run in the command line interface.<p>Windows: Five minutes.<p>I have no idea why this is, but for a noob, it takes five minutes to get Clisp on slime up and running on windows XP.<p>I am aware that it takes someone experienced very little time.  But this is what it takes a noob who has to find out firsthand how to deal with glitches in macports and such.<p>I'm also aware there's probably a download site that is much more user-friendly than the others.  But this does not take away the fact there are many user-unfriendly download sites, and it's hard to tell them apart if you're a noob.  So, just putting this out there; for some odd reason, you can install clisp on windows xp if you go to<p>http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/download.html<p>and you'll be done in five minutes.
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tx
After trying to get Pylons+PythonLDAP work on MacOS X I am slowly giving up on
this OS as a platform for development. Yes it can be done and it's not THAT
hard, but why? For coders _Linux just works_ \- everything takes seconds as
opposed to minutes. Plus you get a nicer font rendering.

Sorry for the rant. It's just frustrating: I had high expectations for it.

~~~
Kaizyn
Sure Linux just works... but your presentations on a shiny Mac Book Pro will
be all the slicker than a boring old Ubuntu Dell. Besides, not staring at an
ugly UI all day has its advantages as do the rest of the Mac productivity
features.

~~~
tx
Boring old Dell? :) Please... Ubuntu runs on a best laptop ever made: black
matte military brick-rugged ThinkPad T61 with a keyboard that most desktops
only dream of, equipped with duplicated mouse buttons up and down and a mouse
"pin" in addition to the touchpad.

This is as close to true mobile productivity as you can get, looks bad ass
too.

The only unfortunate feature on it is the "Win" button, but I configured it to
do "Expose" and "Ring Application Switcher" effects.

Jesus... did I just write that? I'm such a geek. :-)

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gruseom
The Lisp world is fragmented. It's not just all the different Lisps, it's all
the different <Lisp,OS> pairs (or even <Lisp,OS,editor> triples). They all
behave differently. There's also randomness involved: I bet there are others
out there complaining that they couldn't get Clisp running with Slime on
Windows XP.

I doubt this will change. The Lisp universe has always been decentralized
(which has been one of the secrets of its innovativeness). Its culture tends
to be individualistic, which makes things more, not less fragmentary. And
there's still another point - once you do get things working, they work so
well that you forget about the initial pain. So the world divides into people
who remember nothing but the pain (because they never broke through the
threshold) and people who remember nothing about it (because they're too busy
loving the other side).

The good news is that once you do get things running you will approximately
never have that problem again. The differences, at least in the Common Lisp
case, are greatest at the noob stage and cause comparatively little trouble
later on. I realize this is no consolation to the noob.

There are enough kind and intelligent people in the Lisp world who like to
help others learn, and this problem is complained about so widely and loudly,
that if a technical solution were possible I think we'd have it already. Maybe
in the absence of that, we need to do a better job of telling the story of why
Lisp is the way it is, and of helping people get through that initial stage...
maybe a social network to pair Lisp noobs with expert buddies :)

But even this would run up against the cowboy culture. I don't mean cowboy as
in "cowboy coding". I mean the old west, do-it-yourself value system. In my
imagination at least, old cowboys would help noob cowboys, but they wouldn't
coddle them. They'd make sure you didn't get killed, but they sure as heck
wouldn't make sure you didn't get hurt... they'd think it was good for you.

~~~
daniel-cussen
_There are enough kind and intelligent people in the Lisp world who like to
help others learn, and this problem is complained about so widely and loudly,
that if a technical solution were possible I think we'd have it already._

A technical solution would be 1) click to download, 2) unzip, and 3) drag to
applications folder. On top of that, the lisp that does this should be easier
to find, and lisps that are more difficult to deal with should be harder to
find, lest a noob tries to install them.

~~~
gruseom
You seem to have missed my point. I'm not saying a technical solution is hard
to _describe_. I'm saying it's hard to _implement_ \- perhaps much harder than
it seems. You'd have to do it for all Lisps on all OS's. As your own post
indicates rather clearly, getting it to work with _one_ Lisp on _one_ OS isn't
enough.

As for how to ensure that one thing is harder to find on the internet than
another, I suppose we can leave that as an exercise to the reader.

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radu_floricica
Lisp n00b here too, and it's VERY frustating. Makes me remember the days where
installing apache with php meant one day of reading docs and another afternoon
of compiling. It's one hell of a learning curve, and it's mostly unnecessary:
it's not about programming or system architecture, just about luck and getting
it right. Right now i'm having trouble connecting emacs to a remote slime for
the first time. Started slime, created the tunnel, tried to slime-connect to
localhost and... a strage error. I'll dive into it again on monday, but it'll
probably be days before I either figure it out or go around it. And the first
time I tried lispmod with clisp on linux? Had to recompile the apache module
with a line commented. Bad ideea anyways, since clisp doesn't have
multithreading.

Don't get me wrong, i can't wait to start making software in lisp, it's just
... it's taking months to get there.

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bayareaguy
The title is a little misleading since some lisp systems are easer to install
than others. I had mzscheme on my osx 10.5 powerbook working in 10 minutes
when pg released Arc.

~~~
daniel-cussen
I agree, some lisps are easier to install than others. But if you're a noob,
how do you know which one to choose?

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jrockway
What linux were you using? On my Debian system, apt-get install clisp installs
clisp, and apt-get install slime installs slime (and cl-swank).

I haven't tried slime with clisp, however, only SBCL. Any reason why you're
using clisp and not SBCL?

~~~
whacked_new
SBCL isn't as happy as CLISP for w32

------
comatose_kid
Installing Slime with SBCL 1.0.12 took just a few moments under OS X. I'd
consider myself a newbie, but I did have emacs already installed.

Ports can indeed be a little messed up at times. For emacs, I find it fairly
easy to just grab the latest source from gnu.org and build/install it with
their instructions.

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Prrometheus
Installing Lisp? Hell, I have two Ubuntu boxes at home that I can’t connect to
the internet.

There’s always the XP partitions for when I need to get things done, though.

~~~
daniel-cussen
Tell me about it. Despite all the flack XP gets/deserves, this one time, it
just worked. Apple and Linux just didn't work.

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rplevy
I realize that in a way I am just restating what other people have said, but
it seems very odd to me that this complaint would even come up in 2008. We are
living in a time when Linux distributions have amazing package management that
make Apple and Microsoft seem primitive in comparison. If your distribution
can't do that, it's time to switch. I like Ubuntu personally. I have several
different dialects of lisp installed and a slime environment in emacs. It took
me a matter of literally seconds to install each one of them. Just apt-get
install sbcl or if you're using a distribution that uses yum, then yum install
sbcl. Or clisp, or whatever else you want to try using.

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jcromartie
I never had any trouble getting clisp running under OS X. MacPorts is nice as
long as the port you're after actually works. Although, now that I think about
it, I do recall the clisp port being broken at some point. I just downloaded
the tarball and ./configure;./build'ed it myself, though.

PLT Scheme is much easier, though. I'd highly recommend it for any variety of
noob. I've installed it with no issues on OS X, Windows, and FreeBSD.

------
TFrancis
apt-get install sbcl

~~~
astine
pacman -S clisp

I don't know what this fellow's problem was, clisp is fairly easy to install.
Getting asdf to work properly might be a pain, but clisp itself was easy.

------
tjr
I bought my first Mac in 2002, a G3 iBook. I installed GCC via the standard OS
X development tools, downloaded the source code for CLisp, did configure and
make, and it built and ran "out of the box" the first time.

The build itself took something on the order of 20 minutes, but it worked
without any issues.

------
pslamnp
You might try ReadyLisp for Mac OS at
<http://www.newartisans.com/software/readylisp.html>.

It uses Aquamacs, SBCL and SLIME. Just drop the icon in the applications
folder.

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dkasper
I really don't see how it could take two weeks to get clisp installed on linux
unless you were trying to compile it from source, which I have never had to
try.

Now trying to install various lisp packages you need, that's another story...

------
icky
> Linux: two weeks, gave up when I got Clisp to run in the command line
> interface.

Are we talking Lisp noob, or Linux noob?

As the other posts indicate, use an apt-based distribution (Debian, Ubuntu),
and do

    
    
        sudo apt-get install clisp slime

------
capablanca
1) There's lispbox for linux too. 2) apt-get install sbcl: 30 seconds

