Lisp: No easy download (opens in new tab)

"Where is the link to download Fortran, Cobol, C, C++, and "Assembly"?

You forgot Ada and Pascal ;-)

"single-implementation languages are the exception in industry, not the norm"

If I may dispute this just a little bit, is this really true?

Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, C#, VB(.net) are all "single implementation".

(Though some of these have implementations on different platforms, there is indeed one canonical and dominant implementation(Guido's Python (vs Jython or stackless) , Matz's Ruby (vs Jruby or Rubinius), Micrsosft's C# (vs Mono) ), a canonical download page (googling "$language download" leads to this page)and download links to that page).

Though there are many variants of C and C++ (mostly for embedded devices) , most people (>90% ?) use either VC++ or gcc I think. I don't know about Cobol (never had to work in it Thank God)but I suspect IBM's variant(s ?) is close to having a monopoly.

It would seem that single (or close to single) implementation languages are indeed the norm and multiple implementation languages (with predefined standards and so on) are the exception?

Again I don't think it is a specially useful distinction, just something to think about.

In my (admittedly limited and subjective) experience, languages with a benevolent dictator seem to evolve better than committee/standards driven languages.

I think this (benevolent dictator/single creator vs committee/standards driven design) might be a more meaningful distinction.

All of those languages became popular before the web when widespread free implementations of languages became available and the norm.

I think his point was that even the sites that host specific implementations of Lisp often don't have a direct link to the download.

So a few years back I wrote my M.Sc. thesis as a part of which I implemented an engine for Polish interactive fiction (a.k.a. text adventure) games (which is a very different problem from English interactive fiction because of inflection and the fact that in Polish the order of words in a sentence is not as rigid as in English.) The example game I made using this engine was a remake of the classic "Hobbit." All the code was in Common Lisp and it was a console game at that point but I wanted to add some graphics to make it look more like the original.

I looked into several options, starting from cl-sdl, but (at least at the time) none of them worked on Linux and Windows with the Common Lisp implementation I used (which was clisp.) I don't remember the details but I spent a good week pounding my head against the wall. clisp has a very good ffi mechanism but you can't use ffi to call into SDL because SDL (on some platforms at least) needs to use its own main() function, so once you're running your Lisp code it's too late.

In the end I decided to implement the graphics part in C and just talk to the Common Lisp backend over a pipe. If you speak Polish you can check out the results on http://www.jfedor.org/pfedor/hobbit.html

Note that this method would not have been possible for anything much more complex, like say an arcade game, and also that in other languages it would typically be trivial (say using pygame in Python.)

It was generally library problems, but then I was trying to use sbcl on windows the last time I attempted CL development (this was over a year ago, before I found out about clojure) so even the libraries that DID exist were painful to deal with.

Maybe things have changed but I could not make much headway with ASDF so even when I did find the libraries... yeah. And yes I did have cygwin installed which is why I got past some of the problems.

Maybe I'd have made real headway if I were full on in Linux land where sbcl and everything else has much better support, since it's built around the *nix tool chain.

And sometimes it feels like: "Hacker News - Go away", and I'm just fine with that, too. :)

Please ignore the troll article. Anybody interested in a programming language can google for implementations and compare them. I don't understand why there needs to be a single lisp.exe binary.

The abundance of Scheme implementations is actually a good thing: there is a scheme for every n-choose-r machine configurations :-)

http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-standards#implem...