Why is the Lisp community so fragmented? [closed]

Answer 1

I think it is because "Lisp" is such a broad description of a language. The only common thing between all the lisps that I know is most things are in brackets, and uses prefix function notation. Eg

(fun (+ 3 4))

However nearly everything else can vary between implementations. Scheme and CL are completely different languages, and should be considered like that.

I think calling the lisp community fragmented is like calling the "C like" community fragmented. It has c,c++,d,java,c#, go, javascript, python and many other languages which I can't think of.

In summary: Lisp is more of a language property (like garbage collection, static typing) than an actual language implementation, so it is completely normal that there are many languages that have the Lisp like property, just like many languages have garbage collection.

Answer 2

The fact that there are many implementations of Common LISP should be considered a good thing. In fact, given that there are roughly the same number of free implementations of Common LISP as there are free implementations of C++ is remarkable, considering the relative popularity of the languages.

Free Common LISP implementations include CMU CL, SBCL, OpenMCL / Clozure CL, CLISP, GCL and ECL.

Free C++ implementations include G++ (with Cygwin and MinGW32 variants), Digital Mars, Open Watcom, Borland C++ (legacy?) and CINT (interpreter). There are also various STL implementations for C++.

With regards to Scheme and Common LISP, although admittedly, an inaccurate analogy, there are times when I would consider Scheme is to Common LISP what C is to C++, i.e. while Scheme and C are small and elegant, Common LISP and C++ are large and (arguably) more suited for larger applications.

Answer 3

Two possible contributing factors:

Lisp languages aren't hugely popular in comparison to other languages like C/C++/Ruby and so on - that alone may give the illusion of a fragmented community. There may be equal fragmentation in the other language-communities, but a larger community will have larger fragments..

Lisp languages are easier than most to implement. I've seen many, many "toy" Lisp implementations people have made for fun, many "proper" Lisp implementations to solve specific tasks. There are far more Lisp implementations than there are, say, Python interpreters (I'm aware of about.. 5, most of which are generally interchangeable)

There are promising projects like Clojure, which is a new language, with a clear goal (concurrency), without much "historical baggage", easy to install/setup, can piggyback on Java's library "ecosystem", has a good site with documentation/libraries, and has an official mailing list. This pretty much checks off every issue I encountered while trying to learn Common Lisp a while ago, and encourages a more centralised community.

Answer 4

I think it's because Lisp was born out of, and maintains the spirit of the hacker culture. The hacker culture is to to take something and make it "better" according to your belief in "better".

So when you have a bunch of opinionated hackers and a culture of modification, fragmentation happens. You get Scheme, Common Lisp, ELISP, Arc. These are all pretty different languages, but they're all "Lisp" at the same time.

Now why is the community fragmented? Well, I'll blame time and maturity on that. The language is 50 years old! :-)

Answer 5

Scheme and Common Lisp are standardized. SBCL seems like the defacto open source lisp and there are plenty of examples out there on how to use it. It's fast and free. ClozureCL also looks pretty darn good.

PLT Scheme seems like the defacto open source scheme and there are plenty of examples out there how to use it. It's fast and free.

The CL HyperSpec seems as good as the JavaDoc to me.

As far as community fragmentation I think this has little to standards or resources. I think this has far more to do with what has been a relatively small community until recently.

Clojure I think has a good chance to become The Lisp for the new generation of coders.

Perhaps my point is a very popular implementation is all that is required to give the illusion of a cohesive community.

Answer 6

My point of view is that Lisp is a small language so it is easy to implement (compare to Java, C#, C, ...).

Note: As many comment that it is indeed not that small it miss my point. Let me try to be more precise: This boll down to the entry point price. Building a VM that compile some well know mainstream language is quit hard compare to building a VM that deal with LISP. This would then make it easy to build small community around a small project. Now the library and spec may or may not be fully implemented but the value proposition is still there. Closure it a typical example where the R5RS is certainly not in the scope.