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From: Pascal Costanza on 12 Jun 2010 15:31
On 12/06/2010 19:36, bolega wrote:

> What was your main reason for picking the Allegro (commercial) as
> opposed to one of the open source ones ? Is there anything in this old
> norvig book that makes it worth pursuing as a text ?
>
> http://norvig.com/paip.html

My favorite Common Lisp environment is LispWorks, which is a commercial
offering, but I regularly deal with many other Common Lisp
implementations as well, including both commercial ones and open source
ones, due to my role as a maintainer of a compatibility layer that is
widely used.

When I started using Common Lisp a couple of years ago, I started with a
commercial environment (Macintosh Common Lisp back then). The main
reason was that this allowed me to focus on learning the language, while
being able to use an IDE that was relatively close to what other IDEs
offered in a familiar way. Back then, it seemed too much of a hassle to
set up an environment using Emacs + some open source Common Lisp
implementation, which was (and still is) the most widely used choice in
a pure open source setting.

I still believe that this is a major strength of the commercial systems,
that you have a mostly hassle-free set up and can directly go into
learning and/or programming in Common Lisp, without having to install,
set up, and/or learn other tools, which may be non-trivial. (Of course,
if you are already used to using Emacs, for example, this may be less of
a problem for you.)

Some people have the fear that there is a risk of a vendor lock-in if
you go the commercial route. However, that's not really true: The
portability of Common Lisp code across different implementations is
excellent, and it is very hard to paint yourself into a corner. Since
the commercial systems also provide free editions, which have some
limitations but are usually more than good enough for learning purposes,
you can also decide to just use them for learning, and then still make
your mind up later on which implementation you eventually go with - at a
stage when you can make a well-informed, and thus better choice. In
fact, it seems to me that it's quite common that Common Lisp users do
use several implementations on a regular basis, taking advantage of
their various strengths depending on the task at hand.

Just my �0.02.


Pascal

--
My website: http://p-cos.net
Common Lisp Document Repository: http://cdr.eurolisp.org
Closer to MOP & ContextL: http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/
From: Pascal Costanza on 12 Jun 2010 15:50
On 12/06/2010 19:36, bolega wrote:
> Is there anything in this old
> norvig book that makes it worth pursuing as a text ?
>
> http://norvig.com/paip.html

This "old" book by Peter Norvig is still one of the best Common Lisp
introductions you can find, and has some excellent material that is not
covered elsewhere. If you are interested in some fundamental AI concepts
at the same time, this is one of the best choices.


Pascal

--
My website: http://p-cos.net
Common Lisp Document Repository: http://cdr.eurolisp.org
Closer to MOP & ContextL: http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/
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