Our great sponsors
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
-
rhombus-brainstorming
Discontinued Brainstorming and draft proposals for Rhombus [Moved to: https://github.com/racket/rhombus-prototype]
In my case the "because" was the lack of multi-methods. And in looking into that a little bit and finding generics and a package to extend them that was unmaintained, and finding a long discussion about multi-methods for porting the code for Functional Differential Geometry that was active for a bit and then dropped, and then looking again at some of the libraries that drew me in (like DrBayes) that was no longer maintained, I concluded that as an academic language there are a lot of elegant interesting packages that are one and done projects. The student graduates. The package rots.
In my case the "because" was the lack of multi-methods. And in looking into that a little bit and finding generics and a package to extend them that was unmaintained, and finding a long discussion about multi-methods for porting the code for Functional Differential Geometry that was active for a bit and then dropped, and then looking again at some of the libraries that drew me in (like DrBayes) that was no longer maintained, I concluded that as an academic language there are a lot of elegant interesting packages that are one and done projects. The student graduates. The package rots.
Once you become a skeptic, other warts began to appear such as the culture (1,2) of the language and one of the active academic members putting a lot of effort into changing the syntax. I concluded that I might as well spend my time just learning common lisp as then I might have a tool I could use. Everything is old in common lisp, and I am coming to recognize that as a good thing. Re-inventing the wheel is not always useful, and a few libraries that everyone uses means they probably function and build.