Post by Vsevolod Dyomkin

Post by Faré

Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL

Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL

on the fact that they have stopped maintaining their stuff altogether? As

you say below, there are a number of people who are not very active, but

continue accepting occasional patches - that's, actually, very little work

given the stability of most of their important projects that the community

relies upon. I know about Nathan, and the majority of his projects are

already taken care of by sharplispers.

Is there a confirmation from all of the listed (and also unlisted) personson the fact that they have stopped maintaining their stuff altogether? Asyou say below, there are a number of people who are not very active, butcontinue accepting occasional patches - that's, actually, very little workgiven the stability of most of their important projects that the communityrelies upon. I know about Nathan, and the majority of his projects arealready taken care of by sharplispers.

Post by Vsevolod Dyomkin

It would be great to see a list of those projects to be able to assess the

scale of the issue.

It would be great to see a list of those projects to be able to assess thescale of the issue.

At least Edi Weitz, Hans Huebner, Nathan Froyd have made it official(and soon me).Gabor Melis, Nikodemus Siivola — maybe it's just me they've beenignoring me for months on github, by mail and on twitter; maybe theystill think they'll get back to Lisp some day; in the meantime theirsoftware has bitrotted on Quicklisp.David Lichteblau, Cyrus Harmon, Henrik Hjelte, Andreas Fuchs, KevinRosenberg, Samium Gromoff — I believe at least some of them have madeit official.There are many more authors who have quit whose name doesn't come tome at this point, but that you'll identify as you skim the list ofpackages of Quicklisp.And there are just orphan packages, untouched in years.And sometimes abandoned packages still work great, or are unusedanyway, so that's fine. Software lives, software dies. Sometimespeacefully, sometimes in a fire.However, consider that if you migrate to Sharplispers too eagerly, youmay waste time; but if you wait for the bitrot to set in before youfork any given library, you won't see the PRs piling before theproject is in such disarray that three people reimplement from scratchlibraries that each do the 20% they need, further balkanizing thecommunity.I believe CL could benefit a lot from a little bit more coordinationon library development and maintenance. But obviously, part of thereason I'm jumping ship is that I don't believe this is going tohappen (the other part is my wanting to do things that can't be doneon top of CL-provided abstractions). The activation energy for somekinds of interactions is too high in CL. And that's fine, to each hisown.Not my job anymore. I would just rather pass the baton as I leave thandrop it on the floor. But I'll drop it if no one takes it.I used to chase after authors whose systems I broke as I evolved ASDFand it didn't support their abuse of ASDF internals or use ofdeprecated ASDF functionality, and so I noticed a lot of things (andremained blind to others of course). If anyone after me decides tokeep improving ASDF (rather than merely keep it running as is), he'llnotice as much.—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.orgSuggesting I hate people with religion because I hate religion is likesuggesting I hate people with cancer because I hate cancer. — Ricky Gervais