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common lisp
Aug. 3rd, 2012 10:49 pmI 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.
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.
