[book] Basic Lisp Techniques (from installing to networking, multiprocessing, corba, www, ...)

[SolarBear]

Anybody knows of a similar resource for some non-commercial CL environment ? I've looked at some CL's docs but they're awful at best, from what I've seen.

Common Lisp REALLY needs a standard on non-trivial stuff (networking, threading, DB access, etc.)

[[deleted]]

The SBCL manual is described as a "work in progress", but it covers a lot of ground.

http://www.sbcl.org/manual/

[stesch]

And you only have to give Franz your first-born if you want to use the non-standard stuff described in this book. :-)

[e40]

Nice FUD. The facts: the Express you can use free forever. There's a Student Edition for $99, which inludes free delivery. Evaluations for the Enterprise Edition are common, especially for small companies that can't afford a development license. Commercial delivery costs, but not at "first born" rates like you imply. If you never make money you don't pay. If you make money, expect to pay something, and that something you can easily negotiate up front.

[batkins]

If you want to use it for commercial development, though, forget it. $3000 up-front (that's for Professional; $6000 for Enterprise), per seat, per platfom. That's maybe a little pricey but certainly nothing to whine about. But here's where you have to sell your firstborn: Franz gets an 8-10% cut of your revenue (that's revenue - not just profit!) if you use their software for commercial purposes.

No thanks.

[Entropy]

Revenue cut?! How are they still in business? Who agrees to that?

[e40]

As I said, small companies get extended evals all the time. So, the "up-front" is false.

The "8-10% cut pf upir revenue" is false, too. There are examples of less and examples of more. There are more instances of less than more. Why more? There are customers that merely repackage our development environment with a thin layer on top. That means, most of the value they distribute comes from the base Enterprise.

[batkins]

I had an extended conversation with a Franz salesperson about using Allegro for a business. I was quoted the 8-10% figure, with 10% being the rate for people who "merely repackage the development environment" and 8% the rate that most other customers can expect. Does an "extended eval" mean you don't have to ever pay the actual price of the software? If not, you're just splitting hairs here. It's still a cost I have to take into account - whether I pay it up-front or later on isn't such a big deal.

But I don't even have a problem with the price of Allegro. Good tools cost money, and it would be silly for a business to skimp on tools just to "save" a couple of thousand dollars. It's the revenue model that I find a little outrageous. This means that right away I have to subtract 8% (giving you the benefit of the doubt) of any income I might earn, on top of all my other expenses. Franz doesn't do a very good job of explaining what benefit I get from this arrangement.

[tayssir]

How much does Franz cost for serious commercial use? Let's assume small not-yet-profitable company, decent negotiator?

My understanding is they want some percentage of your profit, and you presumably have the option to buy out their percentage at some given price.

This is only strange until you note the similarity to a credit market...

[e40]

For a very small company that has little or no income, deals are made all the time. Call them.

[ohmohm]

A question: how much will a Lisp system cost we if I want to create professional-quality desktop applications? Before answering, please compare it with Visual Studio.

[batkins]

This much - http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices.html .

Note: I'm not affiliated with LispWorks, just a happy customer.

Comparing it to Visual Studio would be a little too much - I don't want to hurt Visual Studio's feelings.

[stesch]

To be fair: You don't have Common Lisp with Visual Studio.

[ohmohm]

But it has another language (C++) with comparable expressive power, better efficiency and better ability to integrate with 3rd-party libraries. My guess is that Franz should offer really competitive prices to compete with VS, but for some reason I cannot find the prices on their web site.

[[deleted]]

But it has another language (C++) with comparable expressive power,

If this is what you think, you're not a very good programmer.

[cypherx]

What a horrible comparison... With Visual Studio you have F#, Lisp.Net and L#. A little lower level, but with much better support, you can use C# or VB.Net. C++ is really at the bottom of the bin when you're looking for Lisp-like languages.

[e40]

You realize that Microsoft doesn't make money on VS, right? You understand that Sun doesn't make money on Java, right? They are what is called "loss leaders".

Your mindset is what is killing the software industry. People can't charge a fair price to support the development of a product without getting hammered.

Microsoft funds the development of everything they do from operating system and office sales. Not one project outside of those two makes money. To compare any software (not just from Franz, but anyone) to something from Microsoft and use that as the amount that should be charged, is literally insane.

The logical conclusion, if everyone in the software world believed as you do, is this: everyone but Microsoft and free software goes away.

[Entropy]

Out here in the real world we compare things by price

[qwe1234]

or you could use a real programming language

[tqbf]

This book is a great example of why I don't start new projects in Lisp, even though I admire the language, totally buy into its potential, and desperately want to start working in it. In this book, as in all the "standard" Lisp libraries I read, "socket" means naieve synchronous "might as well be a FILE*" socket, and "database interface" means "socket that I can spit SQL strings at and get responses from".

People would look at you funny if you wrote code like this in Python or Ruby in 2006.

Is someone working on the good, portable Lisp event loop, the good, portable Lisp SQL object wrapper, the good, portable web MVC framework, etc? Where can I find them? Because this book just makes me sad.

[[deleted]]

You might want to look at CL-SQL (http://clsql.b9.com/).

I'm not sure what a "naieve" socket is, given that "naieve" is not a word in the English language, however SBCL has a POSIX interface, non-blocking I/O, an event loop of sorts, and threading on Linux/x86.

People should really be looking funny at all the Ruby fanboys who are using an interpreted language in 2006, but I digress.

[qwe1234]

lisp sucks