Novice CL user writes mysql access in CL as an exercise

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.lispworks.general/9622

by wglb • 17 years ago

67 6 17 years ago

article.gmane.org

wglb• 17 years ago

By way of Zach Beane: http://xach.livejournal.com/238408.html

mark_l_watson• 17 years ago

That looks pretty good. A great way to learn a new language: write something useful.

bgray• 17 years ago

Yes! Writing something significant is a great way to learn a language. I have also learned a great deal from solving the Euler Project problems. Either way, just get your hands dirty!

rbanffy• 17 years ago

That's something I have been observing with some languages.

Perhaps there is a point it's so easy t build useful stuff that the ease builds fragmentation. If ít's easier to write a new library than to adapt to one already existing, you have a situation where everybody just writes new libraries from scratch. The easier to write, the more fragmentation you get.

Keeping fragmentation low requires effort.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

The list of questions attached to the article suggests an excellent reason why re-implementing something like this as a novice to a platform is a bad idea.

I've been guilty of exactly that (in java, a persistence layer for classes) and was rightly shown why that is not a good thing to do. Too many edge cases and a serious maintenance problem in the longer term.

Before you know it you are maintaining your database connector more than you are your original reason for writing it (the problem that needed to be solved).

I'm not too familiar with the common lisp ecosystem but there is a reason why there are N reasons of doing things there, all of them with varying degrees of feature overlap and stability.

Unless you have a really good idea on how you are going to move the field as a whole forward by re-implementing something your time is likely (but not always!) better spent by improving a solution already out there than by writing another partial implementation from scratch.

The first few weeks of progress on anything new it always seems like you're literally on a roll, after that the slowdown comes and the hard work begins.

tjr• 17 years ago

I would agree that releasing it and maintaining it as a real (even if open source) product would be a huge task, especially for a novice, but I got the impression that his goal was just to build something for the purpose of learning more about Lisp programming.

Novice CL user writes mysql access in CL as an exercise

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