[Gardeners] Resignation as CL Gardeners Green Thumb

[Stuart Sierra]

Duncan Rose wrote:
> I still think the idea of gardening is a good one; I suspect we (as 'a 
> community') just haven't yet found anything large enough to coalesce 
> around that has enough scope so that everybody can help out at their 
> respective ability level and feel that their input is useful. I get the 
> impression that much of Lisp (at least the Free bits) is at the stage 
> Linux was at 15 (ish) years ago; download the kernel, download the 
> tools individually, jump through hoops building stuff, and with 
> sufficient perseverance you end up with a useful (although likely 
> bespoke) system you can play with (I enjoyed Linux at this stage :-). 
> The proprietary Lisps seem to me to be more like distributions; they 
> have GUIs and assorted tools / libraries, all packaged together (and 
> documented consistently) and working out of the box.

That's a good comparison.  A "Lisp distribution" would be useful.  Peter 
Seibel's Lisp in a Box would probably be a good starting point, and a 
good place to try out the "Lisp standard library" that has been 
discussed here.  A Lisp distribution that comes with a bunch of standard 
libraries -- regular expressions, databases, web stuff, test frameworks 
etc. -- all guaranteed to work together correctly could make Lisp a 
"batteries included" language like Perl, Python, or Ruby.  The ASDF 
system tests now up at enterpriselisp.com could be helpful in assembling 
such a package.

-Stuart