Quicklisp's effect on your CL habits

Tamas Papp

2011-09-25 11:29:55 UTC

Content preview: On Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:39:32 -0400, Zach Beane wrote: > Hi,

I've been trying to learn more about how Quicklisp has changed how >

Common Lisp hackers work. When I posed the question on the Quicklisp > list,
I got a response from Elliot Slaughter with a point that I hadn't > considered
before: > >> I think part of what makes Quicklisp successful (in my opinion)
is that >> both new *and old* Lisp users love and make use of it. To me,
it's >> really magical to be able to cd into my project, start lisp, and >>
quickload it, and have it just work, even if I have customized versions >>
of some of the dependencies. I think the extent to which Quicklisp >> "just
works" but also stays out of the way makes older Lisp hackers >> happy, which
in turn makes the community more vibrant because library >> and implementation
authors are using the same system that new users are >> being told to use
(which wasn't always true with e.g. lisp-starter-pack >> or asdf-install).

As I suspect the "pro" list likely has more old-timers than newcomers,

I'd like to get your take on this idea. [...]

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Archived-At: <http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.cl-pro/556>

Hi,
I've been trying to learn more about how Quicklisp has changed how
Common Lisp hackers work. When I posed the question on the Quicklisp
list, I got a response from Elliot Slaughter with a point that I hadn't

I think part of what makes Quicklisp successful (in my opinion) is that
both new *and old* Lisp users love and make use of it. To me, it's
really magical to be able to cd into my project, start lisp, and
quickload it, and have it just work, even if I have customized versions
of some of the dependencies. I think the extent to which Quicklisp
"just works" but also stays out of the way makes older Lisp hackers
happy, which in turn makes the community more vibrant because library
and implementation authors are using the same system that new users are
being told to use (which wasn't always true with e.g. lisp-starter-pack
or asdf-install).

As I suspect the "pro" list likely has more old-timers than newcomers,
I'd like to get your take on this idea.

I don't think I qualify as an old-timer, but here are my 2 cents:

1. As a user, Quicklisp made library management much easier. I just
update regularly with each release, and get a reasonably recent
version of libraries that passed a few quality control checks.
Recently, I was setting CL up on a new machine, and it literally took
no more than a few minutes -- thanks to Quicklisp. It is also great
for keeping my laptop and the server are use in a consistent state
when it comes to versions of libraries.

2. As an author of a few libraries, I am now paying attention to the
Quicklisp release cycle (it would be great if the dates could be made
more transparent though). I used to put experimental code to the main
branch of my git repos (essentially using Github as a glorified backup
tool), but now I either branch or wait with pushing until I use it for
a while. In particular, Quicklisp's automated checks about symbol
conflicts etc that are reported as issues on Github are very useful (I
hope that they are indeed automated and don't require a lot of effort
on your part).

Once again, thanks for Quicklisp!

Tamas