Recently I've been doing a major cleanup/arson of CLiki. The cleanup effort was inspired by recurring comments on Hacker News of the form: "I didn't find Lisp libraries" or "I couldn't decide which libraries to use."
I would love for everyone to add a description of their Free Software Lisp libraries to CLiki with ASDF-installable tarballs and appropriate topic markers so libraries are easy to find and compare (maybe do it for cl-user.net first; I'm entertaining the idea of writing a scraper that would auto-generate new CLiki pages from cl-user.net entries). Currently this does not seem to be very realistic.
Instead I'm going to ask people who read Planet Lisp (where this blog is syndicated) to contribute to two specific tasks:
- Go through the list of utilities packages on CLiki (add a CLiki entry with the *(utilities) tag for any utilities packages you know that aren't in the list) and add a description of what they contain to the package CLiki page.
- Contribute to the Great Macro Debate CLiki page.
Right now there are almost two dozen "utility" CL packages offering everything from
my-defun*$%# to
map-nthcadadar (that's a joke, but only a slight exaggeration). It's quite hard to decide what to choose why. To me
cl-utilities seems to be the most sane package, but it hasn't had development since 2006 (maybe it doesn't need it?). Disclaimer: I use
kmrcl and
Anaphora in my software.
The Great Macro Debate was a round-table at ILC 2009 that asked the unaskable: are macros evil?
To most post-Y2K Lisp programmers (like me) this seemed ridiculous. We grew up on
Paul Graham's kool-aid. Macros are powerful, macros are awesome, they are special, don't use them when you can use a function, everything will be great.
But then all these experienced Lisp programmers came out at ILC and said that macros are bad for software maintenance. How can this be? In the absence of concrete examples, the cognitive dissonance was too great. The only defense mechanism was to tell yourself "bad programmers don't understand macros" and move on.
Two events changed my point of view. The first was encountering
defclass* in a commercial project. The second was working with the
TPD2 networking code and encountering my-defun (and you thought I was joking?). I came face-to-face with macros that made software maintenance hard.
The point of the
Great Macro Debate CLiki page is to collect all relevant information as to
why to write macros. That information will then get distilled into a sort of macro style writing document, which will contain examples and recommendations of how to write relevant macros, and what kinds of macros not to write, to make software maintenance easier.
