common lisp

[vlion]

I have picked up rachelbythebay's blog lately and have been going through it. It's remarkably good. Anyway, in http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/07/25/versions/, she puts her finger on a major issue of modern dynamic languages.

At work, in order to deal with Python and ensure that we have the right python installed on these (fairly specialty Linux worlds) we manually install a Python version with make install, from a checked in hg repo. I kind of hate that. It says our language is so unstable that we have to forcibly lock ourselves to a version we can trust, because we know that we can't trust the *other* versions. And don't mention Python 3 or we'll... uhh... get awkward, say rude things about Py3, and change the subject.

It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate standardized languages like Java, C++, Haskell, and Common Lisp. One does not simply create new versions of those languages.

I can take thirty-year old (standard) Common Lisp code and run it on a modern Lisp - it'll work. It's reasonable that I can take pre-CL MacLisp or Interlisp and it'll run with small modifications.

The idea that I can write code today that I can build on for years to come, knowing that Common Lisp is stable and has a live community which will probably exist for many year to come -

That's attractive.

Comments

[dreamatdrew]

That's... actually one of the things I'm starting to like about perl. Namely, that you can specify what version of perl something was designed to work with, and perl will at least try to work like that version of itself. I'll take that as an acceptable happy medium between 'language that changes every 46.2 seconds' and 'language so old it has developed a patina'.

[vlion]

Perl is very aggressive about this whole compatibility thing. I would vastly prefer using Perl at work, but no dice, it's "hard to read" for someone who isn't a coder. X.X

(Of course, Perl has a slew of annoying issues and problems; they are getting fixed, but probably won't really be sorted out until 5.20 or so. :-( )