Clementson's Blog

Bits and Pieces for week ending January 18, 2004

Sunday, January 18, 2004

I've been pretty busy this week, so have only just started to catch up on some other postings. Here's a summary of some that I've found interesting:

• There's been some commentary on my What is the Best Open Source Lisp? posting. Here are a few of the more interesting comments:
  • lemonodor linked to my posting. John's comment and the comments of others on his page are interesting reading.
  • Christophe Rhodes (who works on the SBCL open source Lisp implementation) commented that there is a 'notion that there is no 'good' free Lisp' in reference to my posting. My own belief is that there are several 'good' commercial Lisps. There are also a number of 'good' free Lisps if you have limited hardware/OS/support requirements. However, if you are after an Open Source Lisp that meets the criteria that I listed, then PLT Scheme is the only one that comes close. If somebody has a better set of criteria or thinks that the criteria I listed aren't important, I'm open for a discussion on that.
  • With respect to how they are able to produce such a complete Open Source Lisp implementation, a private email to me confirmed the rumor that the PLT team has a hidden sweatshop full of grad students chained to workstations who really do all the coding ;-)
• Chris Double gave some more detail on the background to the development of his SISC Scheme continuation-based web framework. Some of the interesting features:
  • Development can be done from a REPL allowing interactive changes to the system without having to restart the server or reload the servlets.
  • On the fly patching of the system allowing 24x7 operation.
  • XML languages to 'hide' the Scheme for general users. They produce workflow definitions in XML which are translated to Scheme using XSLT. Or they can drop down to Scheme for power users.
  • Continuation based framework for defining the behaviour of the web application.
• Edi Weitz has ported asdf-install to a number of lisp platforms. This is great as it is too difficult to install many Common Lisp packages and asdf-install makes this a breeze.
• I've been following the progress of Movitz since it was first announced on c.l.l. a while back. For those who aren't familiar with it, Movitz is an attempt to produce a Common Lisp system that targets the x86 PC architecture "on the metal" (e.g. -- no OS). The description on the site states: 'Movitz is a development platform for operating system kernels, embedded, and single-purpose applications. There can potentially be several completely different operating systems built using Movitz.' Source code is now available for it. I'm going to have to "have a play" with this one when I get some free time.
• Jaap Weel has created a Lisp Machines page with a lot of neat information. He also links to most of the other Lisp Machine pages that I've come across, so his page is a great resource for anyone interested in LispMs.
• I had been reading about Mark Pauline's robotic work in Out of Control recently, so was intrigued when I saw John Wiseman's posting about the 25th anniversary SRL show. He subsequently announced that it had been cancelled. :-(