The point is that lisp advocates rarely seem to use any of these lisp implementations to do anything noteworthy or useful. They always seem to fall back on C, or some other language that's more "widely available" or "has minimal dependencies" or "has more potential contributors" or "can be more easily compared with other similar programs".I find this hypocrisy to be quite intriguing.
lispm|11 years ago
That's possible. There are many Lisp dialects and implementations which have few applications. That's true for a lot of other language implementations, too. There are literally thousands implementations of various programming languages with very few actual applications. Maybe it is fun to implement your own language from the ground up. Nothing which interest me, but it does not bother me.
If he wants to implement a small new Lisp dialect its perfectly fine to implement it in C or similar.
> They always seem to fall back on C, or some other language that's more "widely available" or "has minimal dependencies" or "has more potential contributors" or "can be more easily compared with other similar programs".
Some new dialect is written with the help of C? That bothers you?
Wow.
Actually 95% of all Lisp systems contain traces of C and some are deeply integrated in C or on top of C (CLISP, ECL, GCL, CLICC, MOCL, dozens of Scheme implementations and various other Lisp dialects). There are various books about implementing Lisp in C.
Really nobody in the Lisp community loses any sleep that somebody implements parts of Lisp in C.
> I find this hypocrisy to be quite intriguing.
Because some random guys implement their own language in C? Why do we have Python, Ruby, Rebol? There was already PERL or AWK or ... Somebody decided to write their own scripting language. So what?
aurelius|11 years ago
When a Python advocate wants to do some data processing, do they first write their own Python implementation in C? No. When a Ruby advocate wants to make a Rails website, do they first write their own implementation of Ruby in C? No.
Several fine implementations of lisp already exist that compile down to machine code and, if the lisp community is to believed, have performance "close to C". So why does a lisp advocate feel the need to re-write lisp in C for a project that didn't actually need it? The lisp community would have us all believe that lisp is the "programmable programming language", and all the other rhetoric about how every other language has just stolen ideas from lisp, etc., etc.. They all truly seem to believe that lisp is something special. That's why I find it laughable that someone like Kaz Kylheku, a 15 year veteran of comp.lang.lisp, decided not to implement TXR by using a pre-existing lisp implementation.