[Gardeners] CL Gardeners: good news, bad news, how to win big

[Peter Seibel]

On Feb 22, 2006, at 12:51 PM, Jeremy Smith wrote:

> On Wednesday 22 February 2006 20:19, Paolo Amoroso wrote:
>> I hope that my comments will stimulate the realization that the  
>> future
>> of Lisp is in the hands of its users.  There are probably no
>> fundamental technical reasons why Lisp is not more widespread: the
>> fragmentation of implementations, the lack of cross-platform GUI
>> toolkits, the difficulty of generating standalone executables, the
>> parentheses, the lack of standardized APIs, whatever.  It's just that
>> not enough users do something.
>>
>> Ideas and discussions are no longer enough.  Lisp needs labor, not  
>> praise.
>>
>>
>> Paolo
>
> I don't know if this is on-topic, but it's related. I just noticed  
> that
> neither Corman nor Lispworks (I haven't checked Allegro) on Windows  
> come with
> ASDF.lisp.

Allegro does.

> I'm sure it can't help Lisp propagation if none of the commercial
> distributions come with what is effectively a portable, freely
> redistributable library (only 40kb too) that is crucial to the  
> majority of
> these CLD efforts.
>
> I'm not saying they won't put it in their distribution, just that they
> haven't, and there's no reason that I can see, for it. Maybe nobody  
> really
> considered it before.

So here's a way to make a minor contribution to the Lisp world that's  
even easier than contributing to the CLD: if you are actually a  
paying customer of either Lispworks or Corman, send them a request  
for enhancement that they include asdf.lisp in their distros.  
Probably better to not do this unless you're actually a paying  
customer--nobody like a whiner unless they're being paid to respond  
to the whining. ;-)

-Peter

-- 
Peter Seibel           * peter at gigamonkeys.com
Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/
Practical Common Lisp  * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/