You know that Lisp distribution model seems to be what Gary King is after too. http://www.enterpriselisp.com/
For my part, I got past the initial hurdle of not having a complete distribution and am now comfortably hacking along with my odd assortment of lisp libraries procured from the Internet. In fact I've come to love the fact that Lisp has no one distribution. The fact that my programs will probably continue to run 10 years from now gives me a warm feeling inside. The only reason I haven't been more present here is that I've been hacking on applications (none finished but all licensed under Free licenses) more so than programming libraries. I have noticed that the Common Lisp Directory has gotten quite large and perhaps the secret here is to create useful repositories and tools of that nature. I'm a Gentoo user and one of the aspects I appreciate about that distribution is the hacker friendliness. They gave me the capability to author my own packages in an easy to build/apply process. Perhaps the Lisp community would benefit from more fault tolerant, decentralized, grass roots like efforts. So I saw someone putting together a web archive of Lisp documentation. This seems like a great contribution. Perhaps the author will provide easy mechanisms for us to pull down pieces or sections of this archive to our individual hard-drives. Brandon On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 03:13:59PM -0400, Stuart Sierra wrote: > Duncan Rose wrote: > > I still think the idea of gardening is a good one; I suspect we (as 'a > > community') just haven't yet found anything large enough to coalesce > > around that has enough scope so that everybody can help out at their > > respective ability level and feel that their input is useful. I get the > > impression that much of Lisp (at least the Free bits) is at the stage > > Linux was at 15 (ish) years ago; download the kernel, download the > > tools individually, jump through hoops building stuff, and with > > sufficient perseverance you end up with a useful (although likely > > bespoke) system you can play with (I enjoyed Linux at this stage :-). > > The proprietary Lisps seem to me to be more like distributions; they > > have GUIs and assorted tools / libraries, all packaged together (and > > documented consistently) and working out of the box. > > That's a good comparison. A "Lisp distribution" would be useful. Peter > Seibel's Lisp in a Box would probably be a good starting point, and a > good place to try out the "Lisp standard library" that has been > discussed here. A Lisp distribution that comes with a bunch of standard > libraries -- regular expressions, databases, web stuff, test frameworks > etc. -- all guaranteed to work together correctly could make Lisp a > "batteries included" language like Perl, Python, or Ruby. The ASDF > system tests now up at enterpriselisp.com could be helpful in assembling > such a package. > > -Stuart
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