Re: Future of PicoLisp?

[Alexander Burger]

Hi Erik,

thanks for the long post!

Just in short:

> 'Learn PicoLisp the Hard Way'

I totally agree. This would be a great project, I'm ready to join.
Same for Stack Overflow support.


> And let's make sure said landing page is served over HTTPS. It's 2017.

Yes, yes, I know ;) In fact, it is on my todo list since half a year.

I want to use Let's Encrypt, as I already do on another server. However, the
picolisp.com server is currently a mix of Wheezy, Jessie and Stretch, and
whatever I tried to get the certbot running resulted in a storm of Python
package mismatch error messages. No way .. I gave up, and decided to wait until
Debian Stretch is stable and thus available from my provider.

♪♫ Alex
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Re: Future of PicoLisp?

[pd]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 1:14 AM, Erik Gustafson 
wrote:

>
>
> 'Learn PicoLisp the Hard Way'
>
> What do you think?
>

I think it's a terrific idea and I'm volunteer to work on it



>
>
> Let's build picolisp.com from scratch. Still in written in PicoLisp, duh!
> Make it a simple, beautiful, modern, responsive home page. And only a home
> page. Something like what I had in mind here, but better:
>
> https://github.com/erdg/picolisp-website
>
> (that is sooo late 2015, lol)
>
> So a simple landing page that introduces the language and loudly points to
> our new book, 'Learn PicoLisp the Hard Way'. Then we transition the
> documentation to GitHub and Stack Overflow, so the whole internet can be
> impressed by how active our community is.
>
> And let's make sure said landing page is served over HTTPS. It's 2017.
>
>
I also think it's a great idea since I think picolisp has a strong strength
in web developing but just because it's 2017 I feel the effort must be put
in integrating picolisp with web (W3C) technologies (css, html 5, xml,
websockets...) and also javascript (json, frameworks, ...)

So what if building picolisp.com from sacratch with presentation done by
CSS javascript framework like jquery and/or bootstrap and content made
compatible with html5 using websockets and json to make an api rest
available for example to communicate with picolisp repl ?

It would be great also to deploy the web in apache or nginx (even lighttpd
or cherokee) to documentate how to integrate picolisp in a corporative
environmet. It would be useful too to use also picolisp as webserver
(httpgate) and show how to scale it up.

I'm volunteer to this too ;-)

-- 
Andrés

*~ La mejor manera de librarse de la tentación es caer en ella**. ~ Oscar
Wilde* ~

Re: Subscribe

[Erik Gustafson]

Hi Chuck,

Welcome to the community :)

Just curious, what led you to PicoLisp?

Best,
Erik

On Feb 23, 2017 8:16 PM, "Chuck Jackson"  wrote:

> I've spent several days looking into PicoLisp.  It looks very good.
> Thanks
> Chuck Jackson
>

Subscribe

[Chuck Jackson]

I've spent several days looking into PicoLisp.  It looks very good.
Thanks
Chuck Jackson

Re: Future of PicoLisp?

[Erik Gustafson]

Hey all,

Another long post.


TLDR: leave the core language development strategy untouched, re-redo the
website, and migrate documentation to GitHub/Stack Overflow.


Re: Git(Hub) for the core language... I'm also on Alex's side here. His
time for core development is invaluable. We would be wise to keep the
process as frictionless as possible for him. No need to fix what isn't
broken.

This conversation seems to come up every year. We all spend a while
rehashing the same arguments, and nothing changes.

Now, I agree that there is a problem with the future of PicoLisp. But it
does NOT have to do with the core language and whether it's hosted here or
there or whatever.

Here's an idea that's been bouncing around my head. I think it could
address some of the problems we're facing (more on that below).

'Learn PicoLisp the Hard Way'

I'm currently working through Zed Shaw's 'Learn C the Hard Way'. It's a
wonderful book, meant for people who already know the basics of programming
(they've learned a language or several). Starting out with the C basics,
the book quickly ramps up. After 52 exercises the student is dropped off on
the far side of intermediate C programming. They have a solid command of
the language, can read and write proficiently, have built a handful of
non-trivial projects along the way, and thus become familiar with common
libraries and tooling in the ecosystem.

The book is also huge on what Zed calls the 'Defensive Programming
Mindset'. For each exercise, there is a section on how to break the code.
So the student learns how to mess up each program in different ways,
exposing all sorts of weird behavior. It shows that the C compiler is not
your friend and really couldn't care less if you trample all over memory.
Through this breaking process, the student learns so much about the
language, common pitfalls, and how to defend against them. This practice
would pair well with PicoLisp, an even more powerful and potentially abused
language.

So I'm proposing a community driven project of 'Learn PicoLisp the Hard
Way'. This would be great for several reasons:

As Lindsay mentioned, PicoLisp lacks a project that the whole community is
behind. We're a bunch of individuals hacking our own stuff, asking Alex
similar questions over and over again. So let's make it a community sourced
project, we'll use GitHub. Boom! Strong GitHub presence checked off the
list.

PicoLisp lacks a coherent front for documentation. So let's distill all
PicoLisp knowledge into a series of 52 exercises. Make it the new face of
PL documentation. Start here, work through this book, and when you're
finished you'll be a strong member of the PicoLisp community. This would
alleviate 'mailing list fatigue'.

Honestly it's mostly an editing challenge. There is so much code buried in
this list and scattered throughout the internet. We just need to assemble
it into a series of exercises that build on each other.

The progression might be something like this:

Set up environment -> Lisp fundamentals -> OOP/DB -> Web Apps w/GUI ->
distributed DB's -> 'native' C stuff -> put it all together for something
awesome (like, idk, a text editor written in PicoLisp?!)

We'll also whip up some short video lectures to accompany the exercises in
the book.

'Learn PicoLisp the Hard Way'

What do you think?

And for the record, I believe Mr. Shaw is onboard with this idea - or at
least he was at one point. Search for 'Learn X the Hard Way'.


Finally some other thoughts as to how we can continue to improve the future
of PicoLisp...

Let's be real, the wiki sucks. I say this as the guy who spent many many
hours last year redesigning it, editing content, trying to make it more
coherent, etc. It's still a mess. The UI is clunky. Its overwhelming for
newcomers. And no one wants to deal with yet another markup language
(though I'll admit I've grown rather fond of it).

Let's build picolisp.com from scratch. Still in written in PicoLisp, duh!
Make it a simple, beautiful, modern, responsive home page. And only a home
page. Something like what I had in mind here, but better:

https://github.com/erdg/picolisp-website

(that is sooo late 2015, lol)

So a simple landing page that introduces the language and loudly points to
our new book, 'Learn PicoLisp the Hard Way'. Then we transition the
documentation to GitHub and Stack Overflow, so the whole internet can be
impressed by how active our community is.

And let's make sure said landing page is served over HTTPS. It's 2017.

Whelp, that was a lot. Take sometime to digest, and then please rip these
ideas to pieces, folks!

"The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is
coming."

-- Some dude in some Batman movie


Peace and PicoLisp y'all!

- Erik

Re: Future of PicoLisp?

[Joh-Tob Schäg]

T
Am 23.02.2017 22:52 schrieb "Lindsay John Lawrence" <
lawrence.lindsayj...@gmail.com>:

> I am relatively new to picolisp, with limited knowledge of its development
> history... but I'll politely disagree with some suggestions here regarding
> making the core more 'popular' and open to 'collaborative' development.
>
> Bandwagon collaboration may in all likelihood dull the scapel and result
> in  something far from pico.
>
> What would be great is to see more of an ecosystem built around the
> picolisp core. Build something awesome with picolisp, document it and share
> it with the world.
>
> I am.
>
> /Lindsay
>
>
> ~~~
> Notes: I made as a read through the email thread...penny thoughts, ...a
> bit opinionated and repetitive and therefore subject to change.
>
> Make what more open? From what I can see, the source going back to at
> least 2002 is freely available for anyone to copy and do with as they like.
> There is no lack of transparency or reluctance to share knowledge.
>
> Compared to almost every other development tool I have worked with,
> picolisp is a breath of fresh air.  The more I breathe in, study the
> succinct examples on the wiki, rosetta code, 99probs, tankfeeder, etc the
> more I appreciate that. Many of those examples, despite their brevity, are
> far from trivial.
>
> It is a scapel. A lot a fun to play with. But it is neither a toy lisp, an
> overspecialized lisp, or -- what it feels like to me now -- the 'all things
> to everyone' bloated cruft that is common lisp.
>
> In the short time I have worked with it, I have yet to write a 'hack' to
> get around some limitation or shortcoming of the picolisp environment. I
> have written a surprising amount of useful code and connected it to other
> tools to do useful things in concert.
>
> It is lisp. Therefore, initially, "Lots of Irritating, Silly, Parentheses"
>  that with practice, quickly become an appreciated, simple consistent
> syntax. Syntax sugar is overrated. Look at the mess of most other
> programming languages as they try to add 'advanced' features.
>
> Even as a newbie, I can see how easily the current picolisp core can
> integrate with, or integrate, other tools. How easy it is to leverage
>  functionality like distributed programming, async io, templated
> programming, underlying os pipes, etc that most other runtimes either don't
> provide at all, end up diluting or obfuscating.
>
> In what other language, even other lisps, is it as easy to say... (= code
> data) ?
>
> A high performance, general purpose, interpreted runtime engine, in a few
> hundred kilobytes?. I wish I had 'discovered' it a decade ago.
>
>
>

Re: Future of PicoLisp?

[Alexander Burger]

Hi Jakob, Rowan,

thanks for the good hints!

> "alea iacta est". However - just in case you are not already aware -
> since version 2.2.2 git now only updates modification times on
> *changed* files during checkout (see
> https://github.com/git/git/commit/c5326bd62b7e168ba1339dacb7ee812d0fe98c7c),

I see. Good to know. I suppose, however, that if you clone a whole new repo you
won't get the original timestamps of the whole tree (as you would from a TGZ).


> checkout hook to force a full build after checkout. It was years ago,
> and I can't find them now that I search for them, but I remember it
> was not too difficult to implement (and I'll keep an eye out for them

Yes, did so too, around 2008 for SVN. But such tricks are a cludge.

I won't use such a repo based system here. Period. I live on incremental
snapshots which I take from my whole home directory tree several times a day,
with statistics and inspection tools, and other scripts. Each of thess snapshots
is fully complete, and has the environment from that moment (not only source
files explicitly checked in, but also temporary files, databases, backups and
whatever). Forcing my working style to the limitations of a repo would be a
drawback.


But, *of course*, nobody will be stopped to do with PicoLisp whatever he likes.
Anybody can build a repo (as some people here already did), and communicate on
in whatever platform. I just don't see that *I* have to do it.

♪♫ Alex
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