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13 points by pg 5936 days ago | link | parent

Did Viaweb count as a real-life project? If so, the answer is that the usual Lisp programming style works well.

Nothing comes for free. There's a cost as well as a benefit to all the bureaucratic stuff that "enterprise" languages and programming styles clutter up your code with: your program gets harder to change. While Viaweb's competitors were following all sorts of virtuous best practices, we were leaving them in the dust in terms of features.



6 points by zachbeane 5936 days ago | link

If Viaweb is anything like the code from Arc, ANSI Common Lisp, or On Lisp, it's hardly the usual Lisp style.

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7 points by pg 5935 days ago | link

I meant programming style in the sense of using exploratory programming techniques, not in the sense of using particular textual conventions or language features.

I think you're also confusing Lisp with Common Lisp. In a lot of ways (the long names, CLOS, the loop macro) CL is kind of unLispy. The coding style used in those two books (and Viaweb) is closer to the conceptual core of Lisp.

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