Lisp: No easy download

http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/No-easy-download.html

by helveticaman • 17 years ago

15 30 17 years ago

runevault5• 17 years ago

I dunno which is a bigger problem, this or the massive library pain issue.

Of course now that Clojure is out there I don't know if CL really COULD gain traction, most people who want a Lisp for "real work" are going that route, or have gone in other power language directions like Haskell, or so it appears from where I'm standing.

mahmud6• 17 years ago

When was the last time you gave up your Lisp project for the lack of libraries, and what were those libraries?

runevault5• 17 years ago

It was generally library problems, but then I was trying to use sbcl on windows the last time I attempted CL development (this was over a year ago, before I found out about clojure) so even the libraries that DID exist were painful to deal with.

Maybe things have changed but I could not make much headway with ASDF so even when I did find the libraries... yeah. And yes I did have cygwin installed which is why I got past some of the problems.

Maybe I'd have made real headway if I were full on in Linux land where sbcl and everything else has much better support, since it's built around the *nix tool chain.

pfedor• 17 years ago

So a few years back I wrote my M.Sc. thesis as a part of which I implemented an engine for Polish interactive fiction (a.k.a. text adventure) games (which is a very different problem from English interactive fiction because of inflection and the fact that in Polish the order of words in a sentence is not as rigid as in English.) The example game I made using this engine was a remake of the classic "Hobbit." All the code was in Common Lisp and it was a console game at that point but I wanted to add some graphics to make it look more like the original.

I looked into several options, starting from cl-sdl, but (at least at the time) none of them worked on Linux and Windows with the Common Lisp implementation I used (which was clisp.) I don't remember the details but I spent a good week pounding my head against the wall. clisp has a very good ffi mechanism but you can't use ffi to call into SDL because SDL (on some platforms at least) needs to use its own main() function, so once you're running your Lisp code it's too late.

In the end I decided to implement the graphics part in C and just talk to the Common Lisp backend over a pipe. If you speak Polish you can check out the results on http://www.jfedor.org/pfedor/hobbit.html

Note that this method would not have been possible for anything much more complex, like say an arcade game, and also that in other languages it would typically be trivial (say using pygame in Python.)

hvs2• 17 years ago

This post is from May 2008 and I couldn't find a link to download Lisp anywhere on his site.

I don't disagree with his point, but over a year to make good on his promise doesn't speak well of his argument.

runevault5• 17 years ago

Since then he switched to using Clojure, unless he's since changed back and I missed it, I don't actively follow the site anymore so couldn't say for certain.

mahmud6• 17 years ago

Where is the link to download Fortran, Cobol, C, C++, and "Assembly"?

Remember kids, single-implementation languages are the exception in industry, not the norm.

It's actually a two way street: where can I download the ANSI/ISO language specification for Perl, Python and Ruby? Just because it's nimble, interactive and quick to hack doesn't mean Common Lisp is a prototyping language.

plinkplonk3• 17 years ago

"Where is the link to download Fortran, Cobol, C, C++, and "Assembly"?

You forgot Ada and Pascal ;-)

"single-implementation languages are the exception in industry, not the norm"

If I may dispute this just a little bit, is this really true?

Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, C#, VB(.net) are all "single implementation".

(Though some of these have implementations on different platforms, there is indeed one canonical and dominant implementation(Guido's Python (vs Jython or stackless) , Matz's Ruby (vs Jruby or Rubinius), Micrsosft's C# (vs Mono) ), a canonical download page (googling "$language download" leads to this page)and download links to that page).

Though there are many variants of C and C++ (mostly for embedded devices) , most people (>90% ?) use either VC++ or gcc I think. I don't know about Cobol (never had to work in it Thank God)but I suspect IBM's variant(s ?) is close to having a monopoly.

It would seem that single (or close to single) implementation languages are indeed the norm and multiple implementation languages (with predefined standards and so on) are the exception?

Again I don't think it is a specially useful distinction, just something to think about.

In my (admittedly limited and subjective) experience, languages with a benevolent dictator seem to evolve better than committee/standards driven languages.

I think this (benevolent dictator/single creator vs committee/standards driven design) might be a more meaningful distinction.

halo• 17 years ago

All of those languages became popular before the web when widespread free implementations of languages became available and the norm.

hvs2• 17 years ago

I think his point was that even the sites that host specific implementations of Lisp often don't have a direct link to the download.

aerique• 17 years ago

Ha, good point! I've been using CL for quite a few years now so this issue isn't even on my radar. But this question could be asked for C++ and probably Scheme as well.

This is a 'problem' for languages with no single implementation that's easily solved by Google. "common lisp download" gives the CLISP site as top hits which is a good CL to start with.

tsally2• 17 years ago

Not at all with Scheme. PLT Scheme is an awesome example of a centralized, well documented language with easy installation and application deployment.

Note the prominent download link on the home page: http://www.plt-scheme.org/

mahmud6• 17 years ago

Please ignore the troll article. Anybody interested in a programming language can google for implementations and compare them. I don't understand why there needs to be a single lisp.exe binary.

The abundance of Scheme implementations is actually a good thing: there is a scheme for every n-choose-r machine configurations :-)

http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-standards#implem...

tsally2• 17 years ago

Step 1: Try doing concurrent programming in Common Lisp.

Step 2: Switch to Clojure.

10ren• 17 years ago

"In order to download lisp, one must first download lisp."

Antiviral marketing.

thunk2• 17 years ago

Sometimes it feels like: "Lisp - Go away". And sometimes I'm just fine with that.

thunk2• 17 years ago

And sometimes it feels like: "Hacker News - Go away", and I'm just fine with that, too. :)

Tichy• 17 years ago

apt-get install

arb• 17 years ago

There are at least five links on the first page of results searching Google for "common lisp download": http://sbcl.sourceforge.net/platform-table.html http://clisp.cons.org/ http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcl/ http://www.franz.com/downloads/ http://www.lispworks.com/downloads/

It's true there is no one link, but his examples suffer a related problem -- no links are provided to Jython, IronPython, JRuby, etc., which is misleading if marginally more convenient.

That said, do people typically download releases, even of Perl, Python or Ruby implementations? I've only used distro packages or RCS checkouts of any of those systems. Is this mainly an issue for Windows or Mac users?

zoba• 17 years ago

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/lispbox/

Lispbox makes it really easy to download and get going with Lisp.

jonjacky• 17 years ago

It's Scheme not CL, but the PLT Scheme/Dr Scheme download and install was easy enough for many in my introductory programming class to get through without help (this was years ago already).

Lisp: No easy download

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