On Dec 14, 2005, at 9:56 PM, josh giesbrecht wrote: > David Aue wrote: > In hindsight I would like to make the >> following suggestions for a LISP in a Box 2.0. >> >> 1) Full power and free tools >> >> 2) Most people run Microsoft Windows >> >> 3) Packages make programming fun >> >> 4) Learning a new and totally unfamiliar editor sucks > > > Let me just say: yes, yes, yes, and again yes. > > I had a LOT of my Lisp enthusiasm sucked out of me simply because > of all > the hassles and limitations (both real and perceived) of wanting to > set > up a free Lisp environment to use in Windows.
So as CL Gardeners dedicated to doing work that improves, however slightly the current situation, we have two choices here: we can attack the real or the perceived difficulties of getting a free Lisp environment that works on Windows. At the moment the situation on Windows for free (as in beer and/or speech) Lisps is this: 1) You can use CLISP as long as you don't need multithreading and can live within the constraints of its GPL license. (Which doesn't quite require you to GPL all your code but does in some circumstances.) This is the best solution if you want a free as in speech Lisp. 2) You can use Franz's trial version of Allegro as long as you don't mind renewing your license every 60 days and don't plan to do commercial work with it. Only free as in beer. 3) You can use Corman which is not quite free (as in beer) but is quite inexpensive. Not free as in speech. I think it also has some weird conformance idiosyncrasies but I've never really used it so I'm not in a good position to say what they are. 4) SBCL is getting quite close to having a Windows port. When it's ready we'll have a free as in beer Lisp under a BSDish license which will be better for folks who don't want to wrestle with the GPL implications of CLISP but who don't want to deal with negotiating a license with Franz for whatever thing they want to do beyond trial usage. It won't, as I understand it, provide a free (as in beer) Lisp with multithreading without another fair bit of work. So folks who are inclined to tackle the real technical problems standing between Windows users and Lisp adoption, the best bet would either be to help out the SBCL effort or (if you think threads are important) to try and figure out how to help the CLISP guys add multithreading to their implementation. The latter seems like a pretty big challenge but if there are any hot-shot C programmers out there with experience working on VMs or low-level OS scheduler type code, maybe you want to take a crack at it. As for the SBCL port, I believe the author of that port is on this list so maybe he can say more about it but I'm pretty sure he's looking for volunteers to help out. I'm not sure what exactly can be done about the perception problems except possibly to point out that with CLISP you get a cross-platform solution similar to what you get with Python or Perl. Or at least those languages as of a few years ago before they had threads. (Do folks really use threads in Perl and Python these days? I left Perl hacking before threads were really soup.) Are there other perceived difficulties that we could do something to mitigate? -Peter -- Peter Seibel * [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/ Practical Common Lisp * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
