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Lisp and Ruby
sdelmont writes "The developers of Rubinius, an experimental Ruby interpreter inspired by SmallTalk, have been discussing the possibility of adding a Lisp dialect to their VM. Pat Eyler collected some ideas and opinions from the people involved and it makes for some interesting reading. For many, Ruby already is an acceptable Lisp, and the language itself started as a 'perlification' of Lisp (even Matz says so) so it is perhaps fitting and might help explain why the whole idea feels right. Now, if someone added support for VB and gave it the respect it deserves, the world would be a better place."
There is not a good Lisp free implementation that runs on several platforms including Windows and that not makes all the code I write there GPL instead of the license I would like.
Having said that, I'm really waiting for news of SBCL running in Windows with threading and all.
However, that's not enough, I would like to have Threads standarised in Lisp and also a GUI for Lisp that's like wxWidgets for C++.
Also, Emacs sucks, and it's the best IDE there is for Lisp. I know some people are mouse-impaired and live for and by the keyboard, but we Starcraft players know better, we must use both very fast. (I have found myself using the odd and hand twisting keyboard commands of Emacs in more sane software, and I was shocked in awe.)
So in short: I would like to use Lisp for a lot of projects, but I can't without investing USD$2000+ (and I can't do it for now). And I would like a better IDE.
Compare that with PHP, Perl, Phyton, Ruby, Java and C++: All of them have non-GPL infecting complete implementations that are available for Windows.
Notes: I tried wxCL but it didn't compiled out of the box in my mingw instalation. I couldn't make it run at all. ECL is LGPL but as the LGPL requires that code linked statically has also to be under the LGPL, then ECL has a license as infectious as the GPL.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
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