CL Gardeners — Tending the Common Lisp garden.

Mission

To improve Common Lisp's attractiveness for people who are considering using Lisp but are also tempted by any of the johnny-come-lately languages that offer, at best, a pale imitation of a subset of Lisp's features. To get people to stop saying, "Lisp is clearly a better language, but ..." and then choosing a different language for extra-linguistic reasons.

The Plan

The basic plan for CL Gardeners is to build a community¹ of folks who are interested in doing work that will improve the Common Lisp landscape. I believe that much of what needs to be done to make Lisp more attractive is like the work of gardening; just as a little weeding, watering, and pruning can bring out the best in the plants already in a garden, so too can a bit of documentation, testing, and extra attention to existing projects make the overall experience of adopting and using Common Lisp much more convenient and productive.

I also hope that CL Gardeners will be an outlet for folks who are new to Common Lisp but already love it and want to contribute. I believe that what newcomers lack in experience is often made up for in enthusiasm and that with a few experienced Lispers to help direct that enthusiasm, we can harness it for the benefit of all Common Lisp users. At the same time we'll be building a culture where novice CL'ers can become expert CL'ers in the best possible way—by actually working with the language. But CL Gardeners isn't just for newbies—any one who wants to help tend to any aspect of the Common Lisp garden is free to join us. Indeed, some of the stuff I hope we will eventually be able to take on will require serious Lisp chops.

So Now What?

In the immediate term I plan to identify some projects that folks can start working on right away. Anyone with a suggestion of something that a CL Gardener could take that would make the Common Lisp garden a bit greener is encouraged to send them my way.

Longer term I hope that the CL Gardeners may be able to work on a few independent projects. A few that I have in mind now are a new FAQ (not necessarily a comp.lang.lisp FAQ but a Common Lisp FAQ), a Lisp Library List that will provide information about various Lisp libraries in a uniform way, and a CL Gardeners Lispbox that extends the Lispbox I built for Practical Common Lisp with more built-in libraries.

Here's a decidedly non-comprehensive list of other things that CL Gardeners might tackle:

• Consumer reports Write a comparison of different libraries that do the same or similar things. Summarize the strengths and weaknesses of each. Include "under the hood" assessment; would I want to maintain this if the author got hit by a bus?
• Code revival Adopt an abandoned library and clean up the bit rot.
• Code mining dig through existing open source code bases of large applications and extract bits that can be packaged as a useful stand-alone libraries.
• Implementation convergence help bring various CL implementations into alignment where there's no good reason for them to differ. This can be done by providing portability libraries or, better yet, by doing the decidedly non-trivial work of finding a common ground that different implementers can actually agree on and then doing whatever it takes to convince them to make the necessary changes to their implementation. ("Whatever it takes" in this case, likely includes patches, test suites, documentation, and civil, egoless, participation in relevant developer forums.)

These are just some thoughts I've had—really the individuals who want to do the work will decide what they want to work on. The real goal of CL Gardeners is to create a community of people who are interested both in actually doing work to make Common Lisp a better alternative and in supporting others who are doing the same.

Sounds great! How do I help?

Much of the (loose) organization happens on the ALU Wiki. The best starting point is the page:

http://wiki.alu.org/Gardeners_Projects

You'll also probably want to join the main list at:

http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners