Anyone heard of Bee Lisp?
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From: Aleksej Saushev on 18 Mar 2010 13:26 refun <refun(a)nospam.gmx.com> writes: > In article <80cal6FcuvU1(a)mid.individual.net>, tkpapp(a)gmail.com says... > >> "Compatible?" I don't think you understand the term. Your BEE Lisp >> is not at all compatible with eg Lisp 1.5, or any other version you >> could call the original Lisp. But compatibility is beside the point - >> Scheme and CL are not "compatible" with each other per se, but they >> are both Lisps. >> >> Regarding BEE Lisp: you are certainly using the parenthesis syntax, >> but you don't seem to know why. The real purpose is of course the >> ability to write sophisticated macros, which give you the real power >> of Lisp. These appear to be ruled out in BEE Lisp, because of the >> primitive macro facilities. > > I'm actually curious if BEE Lisp is a Lisp. .... > Even with all these shortcomings and its lack of support for a lot of features > one might want in a Lisp, one might be able to call it a Lisp, just because it > looks like it might be possible to write a metacircular interpreter for a > subset of it, however nobody has published such an interpreter for it. > > It might also be useful to some Windows developers wanting to embed a Lisp in > their applications, but it's questionable they'll be embedding a real Lisp. > ECL or some Scheme sound like better candidates for programmers looking to > embed a Lisp. If it is Lisp, there should exists mutual intelligibility between BEE Lisp and other Lisp dialects Common Lisp and Scheme included. As you can easily see from above, this is hardly the fact. Therefore BEE Lisp isn't Lisp. -- HE CE3OH...
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 18 Mar 2010 17:47 fortunatus <daniel.eliason(a)excite.com> writes: > I think products like this are usually one of the GPL Lisps wrapped up > for sale (as indeed that is one of the officially approved ways to > make money using the GPL). Or else, bearing in mind the "superficial > compiler" remark, it might be a stripped-down Lisp, or else it is some > project someone spent years building up and is trying to get some > benefit from. > > I wonder if they get any customers? I doubt they provide support, > etc, beyond install instructions, from looking at the site. So what > would the value be? Do they simply count on folks finding their ad > before finding the world of (free, free) Lisps? What programmer who's > interested in Lisp wouldn't Google? > > Or perhaps this is someone who is a consultant, and will use Lisp > anyway, and wants to charge their client for Lisp (which is OK by me > so long as the client understands), and so this is the storefront for > allowing client's purchasing dept to make the purchase? > > In any case, clearly this is not a real business effort in itself, or > else more offered value would be apparent. > > PS - I've often suspected with products that look like a repackage of > GPL code, there might be a trojan. If it was a repackaging of GPL code, the sources should be provided, so there would be no trojan. People wanting to sell trojans would use another license, such as MIT or BSD.... Once again, the goodness of GPL proves over the evilness of BSD! :-) PS: No need to mention that people distributing trojan woundn't mind defying the GPL too. :-) -- __Pascal Bourguignon__
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 18 Mar 2010 18:01 Pillsy <pillsbury(a)gmail.com> writes: > On Mar 18, 7:26�am, Giovanni Gigante <g...(a)cidoc.iuav.it> wrote: > >> Tamas K Papp wrote: > >> > With standardized, mature dialects of Lisp floating around > >> I am curious why this phenomenon periodically occurs: that someone >> arises out of nothing claiming to have invented a "new lisp" -- which >> almost always fails miserably. > > I think there are two closely-related reasons. One is that > implementing a simple Lisp interpreter is not tremendously difficult. > The other is that there is the idea that Lisp is, at its core, a small > number of special operators and primitive functions. There really is a > tradition stretching back all the way to the very beginning that you > don't need to offer a whole lot to be a Lisp. There's a lot of room > between "a Lisp" and a complete implementation of Common Lisp, or a > mature implementation of Scheme, or a respectable new dialect like > Clojure. > > Sure, you don't need much more than QUOTE, LAMBDA, CONS, CDR and CONS > to have a Lisp, but you need vastly more than that to have a Lisp > that's useful as anything more than a learning exercise. The really > pitiful thing about BEE Lisp is that it doesn't even meet that minimal > standard. But even if it did, it's foolishly ignoring the fact that > people have spent fifty years building on that initial simple core. > > It's particularly disappointing because saying, "I would like to use > Lisp as a tool for using and experimenting with Windows DLLs in a > convenient and interactive way," is a perfectly reasonable desire, and > a great rationale for a Lisp project. But how on Earth do you get from > there to implementing a whole new Lisp from scratch? Personally, the only thing that I find frightening in www.beelisp.com is that they do not mention that it's a Common Lisp (or scheme or ISO Lisp). All the rest looks rather nice (apart from a few hints such as: The majority of Lisp systems are provided with a considerable quantity of libraries often frightening users by its large size and slowness. Newbies who studies Lisp usually afraid of it - , they think. Why do we need to deliver additional libraries with the compiler, if all necessary functionality is already present in the operating system? Well, we don't if we are BEE Lisp programmers! ). If they took a CL implementation, and wrapped it in a nice MS-Windows IDE such as what Bee Lisp looks to be, and added features such as "stand-alone" compilation to DLL and nice FFI, I'd be all in favor. Even if it was only a "subset of the Common Lisp language" or even if it was only a scheme. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 18 Mar 2010 18:31 Coddie <eugene.balabanov(a)gmail.com> writes: > So the main focus was to implement classical lisp (McCarthy one) that > has an easy interface to Win32 API. Are you aware that McCarthy work is 50 years old? That is, it is almost as old as the Big Bang, in computer history... I, for one, implemented the AIM-8 LISP in Common Lisp http://www.informatimago.com/develop/lisp/small-cl-pgms/aim-8/ but it is more of a joke or rather an archeological reconstruction and nobody would dream making it a commercial product. Well nobody but you. So, let's grade your Bee Lisp according to this criteria. How well does Bee Lisp compile to a DLL the programs written 50 years ago such as the Wang algorithm? http://www.informatimago.com/develop/lisp/small-cl-pgms/wang.html At least, Common Lisp only needs half a page of compatibility layer to run it unchanged. How does Bee Lisp fare? > (however, with a Common Lisp in mind, I > hope in future releases we'll get more close to CL). You can be sure we all pray so that future releases of Bee Lisp may qualify at least as a "subset of Common Lisp". Check the standard and notice how this is explicitely allowed, and it would be a great feature. In the meantime, you may want to study the literature about "tree shakers", and consider a rewrite using eg. ecl. http://ecls.sourceforge.net/ -- __Pascal Bourguignon__
From: fortunatus on 19 Mar 2010 14:22
On Mar 17, 6:46 am, Coddie <eugene.balaba...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I suppose we should redesign our website and add some kind of forum to > it to move such descussion there... Good idea - and you could collect 1) suggestions for added features; 2) suggestions for improvements; 3) customer stories, including links to their commercial websites. As others here, I wonder why your customers would pay for the product. For instance MzScheme and Guile are embeddable into C programs by design. And I wonder, to make money, why not choose to advocate a mature Lisp product (CL, Scheme, Clojure, etc) and provide services to your customers like training. Obviously with BEE you must provide training already. That way you get a fuller language without investing programmer hours. You could invest more hours into marketing - and you would have a solid basis of features to market. And your training business could probably expand a lot faster. You could extend a mature product with some special DLL interfacing to meet your DLL motivations - and any such changes would be a basis for marketing, as well. |