On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 11:10:49PM -0800, Tracy R Reed wrote:
David Brown wrote:
One good sign is that Python is starting to get alternate implementations.
Why is that a good sign? Perl has been hugely successful with a single
implementation.
The language is still defined by a single implementation, though. Hard to
say if there will be any similarity to what has happened to lisp.
Lisp has failed famously (for certain definitions of failed) for having so
many implementations which results in no common libraries being built up
etc.
I think the "failure" of the libaries to fail to agree is more an issue of
the large, established vendors using their libraries as a selling point
instead of making them a point of commonality.
There aren't a lot of Common Lisp implementations, at least not that are
still around. For the most part, people seem to choose either Allegro or
Lispworks. Both are basically too expensive for an individual, hobbyist
developer.
C has had a lot more implementations than common lisp, and it seems to be
doing fine. The difference is that the libraries generally aren't
proprietary products of each compiler, at least not any more.
I think the commercial lisps have mostly become cash cows and there is
little motivation to try to make the language/libraries into something that
more people would use, lest they risk losing the current revenue.
There is a small amount of work on the free implementations to standardize
somewhat on the libararies. CFFI provides a standard interface for calling
to C which makes a lot of other libraries more readily available. There
still isn't a standard interface to sockets, or threading, however, which
is rather annoying.
David
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