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Comment by doug_durham | Hacker News Reader

So every Lisp developer creates their own time libraries and HTML DOM libraries because it's so easy? No. This is a myth.

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well i can't say for the whole community but i remember someone blogging around 2010 about dropping mainstream languages for his project because all the graph libraries he found were complicated to assess and inadequate.. so he went to write his own tiny lib on commonlisp and was done in a short time.

the lisp dialect growth is also famous, it's less the case these days because people know about it, but it existed

After programming in multiple Lisp dialects over 20+ years, it’s only sorta true. The biggest problem is that “Lisp” is ambiguous. Common Lisp? Scheme? Emacs Lisp? Clojure? They are all legitimate Lisps, but they all have slightly different syntax, semantics, and standard libraries. Even among some Lisps, there are differences (notably Scheme, though Racket has helped by becoming somewhat dominant in some areas). Common Lisp helped reduce differences at the cost of supporting almost everything it was seeking to unify, and yet still has platform gaps that implementations have to fill in. But within a given Lisp, there is a lot of reuse. Racket has a large set of libs. Clojure runs on the JVM and it’s common to mix and match Clojure and Java libs.

note that i'm mostly pro-lisp, and wasn't criticizing, just reporting what i saw when reading about it.

i'd add one thing to your point, is that lispers know how to port concepts from lang a to lang b very easily, support libs, macro layer if need be (see goroutines in clojure) so fragmentation is not as hard it was in mainstream languages (ps: even though today everybody goes into ast / transpiler to experiment)

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