screenshotbot-oss VS clog

Examples (for Common Lisp, so not citing Emacs): reddit v1, Google's ITA Software that powers airfare search engines (Kayak, Orbitz…), Postgres' pgloader (http://pgloader.io/), which was re-written from Python to Common Lisp, Opus Modus for music composition, the Maxima CAS, PTC 3D designer CAD software (used by big brands worldwide), Grammarly, Mirai, the 3D editor that designed Gollum's face, the ScoreCloud app that lets you whistle or play an instrument and get the music score,

but also the ACL2 theorem prover, used in the industry since the 90s, NASA's PVS provers and SPIKE scheduler used for Hubble and JWT, many companies in Quantum Computing, companies like SISCOG, who plans the transportation systems of european metropolis' underground since the 80s, Ravenpack who's into big-data analysis for financial services (they might be hiring), Keepit (https://www.keepit.com/), Pocket Change (Japan, https://www.pocket-change.jp/en/), the new Feetr in trading (https://feetr.io/, you can search HN), Airbus, Alstom, Planisware (https://planisware.com),

or also the open-source screenshotbot (https://screenshotbot.io), the Kandria game (https://kandria.com/),

and the companies in https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies and on LispWorks and Allegro's Success Stories.

https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/

http://opusmodus.com/

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/cad/3d-design

http://www.izware.com/mirai

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scorecloud-express/id566535238

This LispWorks comment on reddit is very interesting:

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As a Lispworks user, yes it is super pricey, but it does make sense for certain people. Arguably, Lispworks provides features that aren't available in any other programming language, Lisp or not.

* Support for just about every platform I can imagine. Yes it's expensive, but if I want to port to a new platform I can pay Lispworks, and get it over with. It'll mostly work without too much changes. It works on Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, Mac, and some really obscure systems.

* Application delivery with tree shaking. May be there are other languages that do this, but I haven't worked with something like this before in my career. (Maybe proguard for Java, but that's very rudimentary compared to LW's delivery). The tool I work on delivers a binary that people need to download during the CI jobs for every run, so having it be 100MB is way too big. After compression, my LW delivered binaries come to around 9MB.

* You mention support being expensive. Actually, for simple support questions LW does a pretty good job of responding back to you. I've asked tonnes of questions over the years, and have not paid for a separate support contract apart from the yearly maintenance contract. I suspect they like people asking questions, because then they fix those bugs and it becomes even more rock solid.

* The documentation is glorious. And in the off-chance that I need to know something that's not documented, I just mail them and they'll respond usually by the next working day.

* Very stable Java support (although the API could be better), let's me use the entire Java ecosystem of libraries when I need it.

* The platform itself is rock-solid. Now SBCL is fantastic, but when I ran my servers on SBCL, I would have a crash every now and then. With LW, I can have my server running weeks (current uptime is a month) with reloading code multiple times a day, and everything is still super stable.

There's more, but I think the rest is more negotiable. For instance, the FLI is a lot more polished than using CFFI, which makes a huge difference in productivity when writing native code. Or the fact that its remote-debugger facility can be used as a very stable protocol to programmatically control a remote LW process. I don't use the IDE btw, so I'm not even considering that. I don't use CAPI either, but I mean to someday.

2023, Arnold @tdrhq of Screenshotbot (https://github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss) on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/11979q4/common...

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You can avoid having to do the step of recording screenshots if you use a tool like Screenshotbot (https://github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss) or Vizzy (https://github.com/workday/vizzy)

Oh yeah, github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss :)

There are open source tools to achieve this workflow. I've personally built screenshotbot (https://screenshotbot.io / https://github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss), I've also built the screenshot testing infrastructure at Facebook. Workday has open-sourced their own tool at https://github.com/workday/vizzy. AirBnb uses another commercial tool called Happo (https://happo.io). Use any of these services with Paparazzi.

There are a few open source tools to do this: there's a tool I built: https://github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss similar to the infrastructure at Facebook, and there's another one built at Workday: https://github.com/workday/vizzy. These are screenshot-library agnostic services to notify you on Pull Requests when screenshots change.

Screenshotbot is completely open-source by the way: https://github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss

So, I'm in the process of defining something I'm calling an easy-macro. (You can see the code here, but I'm going to extract this into a quicklisp library once I'm happy with it: https://github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss/blob/main/src/util/macros.lisp)

I'm the author Screenshotbot (https://github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss) , and I think this is exactly what you need. Although the README claims to not support browsers, it does actually support browsers, both in the open source and non open source version. I just need to update the docs.

Reminds me of the approach of CLOG (Common Lisp Omnificent Gui[1]) and its ancestor GNOGA (The GNU Omnificent GUI for Ada[2]).

They also integrate basic components and even graphical UI editor (at least for CLOG), so you can essentially develop the whole thing from inside CL or Ada

[1] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

[2] https://github.com/alire-project/gnoga

For me David Botton [0] with his work including code, support and videos is doing very nice work in this direction.

I use SBCL for everything but work because I cannot get; we are getting there, but like you say, it’s such a nice experience working interactively building fast that it is magic and it’s painful returning to my daily work of Python and typescript/react. It feels like a waste of time/life, really.

[0] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

I was following along on the Windows page and didn't check back on the main README to see if any of the other instructions would help.

It the answer is "latter", then you could look at Common Lisp and Reblocks (https://40ants.com/reblocks/) or CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog).

I haven't used Clojure professionally in 10 years so with a grain of salt here are my thoughts as only one other person answered...

CL over Clojure: it's the OG Lisp that the creator of Clojure used and wanted to continue using but faced too much resistance from management afraid of anything not-Java/not-Oracle, or not-CLR/not-Microsoft, etc. Clojure shipped originally as "just another jar" so devs could "sneak" it in. If you don't have such a management restriction, why Clojure? If you want to integrate CL with the JVM, you can use the ABCL implementation, there's also something from one of the proprietary Lisps. Some useful CL features that are nice in this domain: conditions and restarts mentioned in a sibling comment (very nice to help interactively develop/debug e.g. a selenium webdriver test), ability to easily compile an exe (perhaps useful for microservices, or just to keep your deployment environment clean and not having to care about Lisp), and ability to easily ship with an open local socket allowing you to SSH in (or SSH port forward) and debug/fix/poke around in production (JVM of course lets you attach debuggers to a running process, even certain billion+ dollar companies will have supervised/limited prod debugging sessions for various hairy cases, but it's not as interactive). You should never hear CL advocates claim you can't scale to large teams/groups of engineers or large multi-million-lines sized projects, though you might oddly hear Clojure advocates sometimes claim you can't (and shouldn't) scale to such large projects -- large groups of engineers are a non-issue for them as well though, the challenge is in hiring, not in the language somehow making it impossible to modularize and keep people from stepping on each other.

Clojure over CL: its integration with the JVM is nicer than ABCL's, so if you do actually want a lot of the great world of Java stuff, it's easier to get at. Database integration libraries are better. Access to libs (Clojure or Java) is via Maven, so it's a larger ecosystem with more self-integrating components (especially around monitoring/metrics) than what's available for Lisp via Quicklisp. Clojure is very opinionated, much of it quite tasteful, and that gives the whole ecosystem a certain consistency. (You can have immutable data structures in CL, you can if you want use [] for literal vectors and make them syntactically important e.g. in let bindings, but not everyone will be on board.) Even though its popularity seems to have stopped growing, at least at the same rate as e.g. Go which it was keeping pace with for a while, it's still popular enough with a bigger community; as a proxy measure there are multiple conferences around the world and good talks at adjacent conferences, whereas Lisp mostly just has one conference in Europe per year and only occasional branching outside of that.

If you're doing a client-side-heavy webapp, ClojureScript is still amazing, CL's answers there aren't very compelling with the exception of CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog) which takes an entirely different direction than the usual idea of translating/running Lisp on top of JavaScript and its popular frameworks.