Comment by aurelius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aurelius | Hacker News Reader

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> > why didn't Kaz use SBCL or CLISP?

> Why should he?

Kaz invested a bunch of time implementing a whole new backquote implementation for CLISP, but it's still not good enough for him to use CLISP to implement TXR? It doesn't make any sense!

Any right-thinking programmer should care about inconsistencies such as this. If I'm evaluating a programming language, and I see someone in its community writing their own language implementation to support an application that could've easily been written using one of the standard language implementations, then it looks to me like the standard implementations aren't mature enough or trustworthy enough for me to use for my application. Not only that, but it suggests that maybe this particular language isn't as good as its advocates claim, especially if I have to drop back down to C in order to meet certain requirements (e.g., portability, speed, wider understanding, etc.).

But any right-thinking programmer already knows that lisp is not worth wasting any time on. It's dead, and people like Kaz, and projects like TXR, are going to make sure it stays that way.

I am not convinced that CLISP can be used to write another programming language which is itself completely BSD-licensed.

See here:

http://sourceforge.net/p/clisp/clisp/ci/default/tree/COPYRIG...

CLISP's licensing is somewhat confusing and appears to dictate the license to the application. So, for example, I probably wouldn't use it for a commercial, closed-source application. For the same reasons, it cannot be used for a BSD-licensed application.

(However, I did use CLISP for the licensing back-end of such an application: that back-end runs on a server and isn't redistributed. Things you don't distribute to others cannot run afoul of the GPL.)

CLISP's license lets you make compiled .fasl files, and these are not covered by its copyright (unless they rely on CLISP internal symbols). However, that is where it ends. Memory images saved with CLISP are under the GPL. (Memory images are the key to creating a stand-alone executable with CLISP!) If you have to add libraries to CLISP itself, you also run into the GPL. I believe that this would cause issues to the users of TXR, which they do not have today. For a user to be able to run the .fasl files, they need CLISP, and of course that has to be distributed to them under the GPL terms, and you can't add C libraries to that CLISP without taining them with the GPL.

You can wrap TXR entirely in a proprietary application, including all of its internals: the whole image, basically. This wouldn't be possible if some of its internals were the CLISP image.

Regarding the GPL, I do not believe in that any more. I will not use this license for any new project. It is not a free software license in my eyes. Free really means you can do anything you want; any restriction logically means "not entirely free". Proprietary products that use free code do not take away anyone's ability to use the original. The problem with the FSF people is that they regard the mere existence of something as offensive. "It's not enough that there is a free program; we must litigate to death the non-free program which is based on the same code before we can be happy."

I think your views on the GPL are spot on. At least we can agree on that.

the 'right-thinking programmer'. How bizarre.

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