Re: How does ILisp/HyperSpec work, and a general observation about Lisp culture

In article <[email protected]>,
rif  <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>As a simple example, it took me quite a while to get the
>ILISP/hyperspec interaction working.  The ILISP manual (p. 8)
>indicates that the ilisp.emacs file provides sample instructions for
>accessing the hyperspec (via Erik Naggum's package).

*snip*

>In the hyperspec, there is no file Map_Sym.Txt.  There is a file
>Map_Sym.txt, but not a Map_Sym.Txt.  This error is not *that* easy to
>track down (it doesn't just say "Map_Sym.Txt not found" for instance),
>the fix for it is one keystroke to committed to CVS, and although I
>reported the issue in March to the ilisp-help mailing list in March,
>it hasn't been fixed (just checked today).

Good god.

Thank you, sir, for pointing this out. It is indeed the problem I was 
having. I should have been able to figure that out, based on the facts 
that:
a) it worked on Windows (as I recall, in Bill's world, case doesn't 
matter), but not on Unix and
b) it wasn't finding anything that is in the index, and Map_Sym.txt is the 
index (yes, I had read enough of the code, code in a language I do not yet 
grok, mind you, to know this).

But, silly me, I expected the documentation to be of slightly more than 
marginal accuracy. Perhaps most people develop on Windows these days.

>If this were totally isolated, that would be one thing, but this has
>been fairly typical of my experience with CL tools.  There's often
>some little flub that takes a long time to track down, and when you
>track it down, people say, "Oh, yeah, I remember that.  You have to go
>into the code and change this line.  That's what I did when I had this
>problem," which is better than nothing, but my experience with other
>languages has been that the tools have a greater tendency to Just
>Work.

That's all I'm saying. 

I would like to see a larger CL community. I would have more neat 
libraries to play with; ones that are of a more recent provenance than the 
1980s, where I have a chance of talking to the guy who wrote them. I would 
have more "recently learned" folk like you who could guide me through the 
rough bits, such as exist in most software communities. Maybee by now, 
CL would have been revised to include better packaging systems, and 
more consistent interfaces to "alien" code and the OS (I think it is safe 
at this point, to be rid of the idea that people are going to write OS in 
Lisp). But, if the basic tools for getting started with CL are pestiferous 
to use, that isn't ever going to happen. Who will bother to learn?

-Lupo
"To believe in one God you have to be a cretin. That is the only word for 
it."-Michel Houellebecq.                                  <[email protected]>


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