alt Hacker NewsThe packaging story in common lisp is.... Not great.
It's hamstrung by archaic naming conventions that confuse newcomers. What CL calls a system is roughly analogous to what most other languages call a package. What CL calls a package is what other languages call a namespace.
Despite all that it's a pretty good language if you can find libraries for what you need. The de facto standard implementation (sbcl) has a very good compiler and an acceptable GC. The language itself is expressive and it makes for very quick and pleasant DX. I love writing common lisp.
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skydhash • last Thursday at 11:55 AM
Is it archaic? A lisp program is a dynamic image. A collection of symbol is very aptly named a package. And third party module can be named as a system (collection of packages).
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> * What CL calls a system is roughly analogous to what most other languages call a package.*
Or a crate, or an artifact, or a module, or a gem, and there's probably other variations I can't remember off-hand.
> * What CL calls a package is what other languages call a namespace.*
Or a module, or a package, or... actually, I don't know what Perl or Ruby call it. I believe C calls it a header, but that's not quite the same thing as a package.
Turns out naming things is difficult (as well as cache invalidation, off-by-one errors concurrency, and).