Claude: Common Lisp Library Audience Expansion Toolkit (2014) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Claude: Common Lisp Library Audience Expansion Toolkit (2014) [pdf]

nicklevine.org

51 pointsdeepaksurti5 comments

Tangential thought, as I don't have time to read the paper in full now: I wish authors would timestamp papers. It really matters whether this is 2019, 2017, 2007 or (since it's Lisp) 1997. Papers exist in larger context of community, which evolves over time. Given no date on this one, I don't know how to evaluate it.

Just a side note: the reference to 1997 seems to be making the point that Lisp has such a long history that a paper about it might be from as far back as 1997. In fact, Lisp was designed and described by McCarthy in 1959 (http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-008.pdf). Lisp was basically a practical software version of the mathematical lambda calculus of Alonzo Church (“The Calculi of Lambda Conversion” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus) as first(?) described in his 1936 paper “An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory” (https://www.ics.uci.edu/~lopes/teaching/inf212W12/readings/c...). This was apparently related to the Church–Turing thesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church–Turing_thesis) but that is way beyond my intellectual depth, so I am not sure.

All correct. Common Lisp, the topic of this paper, was made an ANSI standard in 1994, but in a less official capacity it's many years older, and of course its lineage reaches the 1950s.

On top of that, within the Common Lisp community, one of the most important transformation happened in 2010, with the release of Quicklisp - the de-facto community standard package manager, which drasticly simplified working with Common Lisp libraries (espetially for beginners). Given all that, and the ongoing community evolution, it really matters what year is a paper about CL library ecosystem from.

On the author's website, nicklevine.org, I found it was presented at the 7th European Lisp Symposium, Paris, May 2014.

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