Re: Packages: where is the beef ?

[Dennis Allard (310-399-4740) <allard@isi.edu>]

ks@cs.tut.fi (Kari Systa, Tampere Univ. Technology, Finland) writes:
> ... I'm starting to understand that Lisp is not that good
> as a (general purpose) programming language. ...

If Lisp has some problems due to the fact that it is a self contained
environment with alot of names, fine.  But to conclude that it is not
a good general purpose language is a non sequitur.  The only other
widely used language that rivals lisp for protyping is Smalltalk.
It can be argued that CLOS is superior to Smalltalk classes and that
Lisp, being a 'high level machine language', enables writing more
efficient code than can be achieved with Smalltalk.

and

simon@lia.di.epfl.ch (Simon Leinen) writes:

> ... with 973 symbols, noone can be expected to know them all ...

But very few of those 973 symbols are commonly used terms.  The commonly
used ones are a small set which a Lisp programmer learns as easily as
a programmer of a conventional language learns the keywords of that
language.  At least in Lisp, you have the ability to shadow those
keywords, if you (unwisely) chose that you must.

Dennis Allard
allard@isi.edu