Quoting Nicolas Martyanoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > The Lisp community, although small compared to that of Java or others,
> > is alive and well. It mostly hangs around the comp.lang.lisp
> > newsgroup, and the #lisp IRC channel is always quite busy.
>
> I had a look to #lisp, and it is indeed really interesting.
> For the newsgroup, I never used them; I just lurked a bit on
> comp.lang.lisp, but there are so many spam :(
>
> > > I've been doing a lot of Google searchs to find some stable
> > > libraries, and most of the libs I found were abandoned, hardly ever
> > > finished.
> >
> > What kind of libraries did you need and have not found?
> In general, I need:
>
> - A modern and fully usable GUI (with anti-aliasing, a
> lot of widgets, unicode text rendering, if possible with a GUI builder
> application). I just saw that there was McClim, going to try it today,
You may find that CLIM's learning curve is rather steep, or that
McCLIM still lacks a nice set of widgets, but CLIM is very powerful
(and worth learning as a very well designed Lisp library, IMHO).
> - A fast and full-featured 2d library (cl-sdl isn't developed any more,
> and looking at the code, it doesn't seem to use the modern (and
> enjoyable) cffi API), which performs font rendering, image loading,
> with some GUIs, such as pygame.
>
> - An advanced network/thread library (I need multiplexing
> (select, poll, /dev/epoll, kqueue...), sendfile(), readv()/writev(),
> etc. for network, and classic stuff for threads). usocket doesn't do
> these, and I am looking at iolib.
I can't help you about those two, my needs in these domains are
much simpler than yours and I've never needed to look beyond libraries
like Imago, ch-image, pal, usocket, etc.
> I have always the feeling that these libs are a kind of "old dusty
> stuff", unused outside of a bunch of geeks (don't take it the wrong
> way, i'm just trying to express what I fear); I know it's just a
> feeling, but it's disturbing (some people already told me "forget Lisp,
> use a modern language", it's really bugging :s)
Lisp has been used a lot since its creation, but (as far as I know)
mostly on very hard problems, and its use for more "fashionable" kinds
of applications (web apps, games, GUIs, etc.) is quite recent, which
may explain the relative absence of libs related to those domains.
Concerning language "modernity", I have yet to see a language as modern
as Common Lisp. Many languages are more _recent_ but they all lack some
of Lisp's essential features, which makes them (to me) inferior.
> > > In this context, it's really difficult to be motivated about working
> > > with Lisp. It's a language very tempting, but it seems it has no
> > > future.
I would say the contrary, but I agree that having more nice libraries
would make it more attractive to developers working with some specific
application domains. Work is being done, but I don't know the statuses
of individual projects.
In general, my algorithm for language choice is:
- If your application will mostly consist of library calls, with
very simple business logic, then use the language that has the
best libraries for you.
- Otherwise, use the most powerful language you can find (well,
you've found it :) ), and implement the required libraries (or
contribute to the corresponding projects).
Hope this helps,
Cheers,
--
Matthieu Villeneuve
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