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The nightmare of installing Lisp: a noob's perspective
13 points by daniel-cussen on April 3, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments
Somehow, installing Clisp on these three systems took somewhat different amounts of time.

Mac OS: Five weeks. Installing macports was the worse part. Still can't get emacs and slime together.

Linux: two weeks, gave up when I got Clisp to run in the command line interface.

Windows: Five minutes.

I have no idea why this is, but for a noob, it takes five minutes to get Clisp on slime up and running on windows XP.

I am aware that it takes someone experienced very little time. But this is what it takes a noob who has to find out firsthand how to deal with glitches in macports and such.

I'm also aware there's probably a download site that is much more user-friendly than the others. But this does not take away the fact there are many user-unfriendly download sites, and it's hard to tell them apart if you're a noob. So, just putting this out there; for some odd reason, you can install clisp on windows xp if you go to

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/download.html

and you'll be done in five minutes.




After trying to get Pylons+PythonLDAP work on MacOS X I am slowly giving up on this OS as a platform for development. Yes it can be done and it's not THAT hard, but why? For coders Linux just works - everything takes seconds as opposed to minutes. Plus you get a nicer font rendering.

Sorry for the rant. It's just frustrating: I had high expectations for it.


hrm. I do all of my real work on linux and am writing this comment on my linux workstation - so I'm far from a linux basher.

But, getting fonts that don't suck ass takes a lot of dingy work on linux (fedora, ubuntu, arch, you name it - in my humble experience). And even after that work, the fonts are still ugly compared to either windows or osx.

And personally (being an old bsd guy), I find macports makes far more sense than yum (what a pile of crap), apt isn't so bad, but I still prefer a port tree.


Interesting... I haven't tried anything but apt, but everything I've ever need has always been on it, and of a relatively latest version with hot updates.

Regarding fonts, it's subjective matter of course, but you can look at my desktop (I just did a screen shot) with my font settings. Here we go, no text file editing, just adjusted my font appearance in "Fonts" tab in Gnome:

http://kontsevoy.com/gutsy.png

My wife has been envious about this "punchy" font rendering for quite some time (until she got a Mac), but my colleagues at work still are (they're still on Windows).


Yeah, Ubuntu now comes pre compiled with the patent violating good font rendering. I run with no font smoothing and full hint. Much better than when you used to have to recompile the kernel. Doesn't look like Apple is going to sue anytime soon.


Sure Linux just works... but your presentations on a shiny Mac Book Pro will be all the slicker than a boring old Ubuntu Dell. Besides, not staring at an ugly UI all day has its advantages as do the rest of the Mac productivity features.


Boring old Dell? :) Please... Ubuntu runs on a best laptop ever made: black matte military brick-rugged ThinkPad T61 with a keyboard that most desktops only dream of, equipped with duplicated mouse buttons up and down and a mouse "pin" in addition to the touchpad.

This is as close to true mobile productivity as you can get, looks bad ass too.

The only unfortunate feature on it is the "Win" button, but I configured it to do "Expose" and "Ring Application Switcher" effects.

Jesus... did I just write that? I'm such a geek. :-)


> Besides, not staring at an ugly UI all day has its advantages as do the rest of the Mac productivity features.

You actually didn't state what any of these features were, or what the advantages of not staring at an ugly UI all day was.


The Lisp world is fragmented. It's not just all the different Lisps, it's all the different <Lisp,OS> pairs (or even <Lisp,OS,editor> triples). They all behave differently. There's also randomness involved: I bet there are others out there complaining that they couldn't get Clisp running with Slime on Windows XP.

I doubt this will change. The Lisp universe has always been decentralized (which has been one of the secrets of its innovativeness). Its culture tends to be individualistic, which makes things more, not less fragmentary. And there's still another point - once you do get things working, they work so well that you forget about the initial pain. So the world divides into people who remember nothing but the pain (because they never broke through the threshold) and people who remember nothing about it (because they're too busy loving the other side).

The good news is that once you do get things running you will approximately never have that problem again. The differences, at least in the Common Lisp case, are greatest at the noob stage and cause comparatively little trouble later on. I realize this is no consolation to the noob.

There are enough kind and intelligent people in the Lisp world who like to help others learn, and this problem is complained about so widely and loudly, that if a technical solution were possible I think we'd have it already. Maybe in the absence of that, we need to do a better job of telling the story of why Lisp is the way it is, and of helping people get through that initial stage... maybe a social network to pair Lisp noobs with expert buddies :)

But even this would run up against the cowboy culture. I don't mean cowboy as in "cowboy coding". I mean the old west, do-it-yourself value system. In my imagination at least, old cowboys would help noob cowboys, but they wouldn't coddle them. They'd make sure you didn't get killed, but they sure as heck wouldn't make sure you didn't get hurt... they'd think it was good for you.


There are enough kind and intelligent people in the Lisp world who like to help others learn, and this problem is complained about so widely and loudly, that if a technical solution were possible I think we'd have it already.

A technical solution would be 1) click to download, 2) unzip, and 3) drag to applications folder. On top of that, the lisp that does this should be easier to find, and lisps that are more difficult to deal with should be harder to find, lest a noob tries to install them.


You seem to have missed my point. I'm not saying a technical solution is hard to describe. I'm saying it's hard to implement - perhaps much harder than it seems. You'd have to do it for all Lisps on all OS's. As your own post indicates rather clearly, getting it to work with one Lisp on one OS isn't enough.

As for how to ensure that one thing is harder to find on the internet than another, I suppose we can leave that as an exercise to the reader.


Lisp n00b here too, and it's VERY frustating. Makes me remember the days where installing apache with php meant one day of reading docs and another afternoon of compiling. It's one hell of a learning curve, and it's mostly unnecessary: it's not about programming or system architecture, just about luck and getting it right. Right now i'm having trouble connecting emacs to a remote slime for the first time. Started slime, created the tunnel, tried to slime-connect to localhost and... a strage error. I'll dive into it again on monday, but it'll probably be days before I either figure it out or go around it. And the first time I tried lispmod with clisp on linux? Had to recompile the apache module with a line commented. Bad ideea anyways, since clisp doesn't have multithreading.

Don't get me wrong, i can't wait to start making software in lisp, it's just ... it's taking months to get there.


The title is a little misleading since some lisp systems are easer to install than others. I had mzscheme on my osx 10.5 powerbook working in 10 minutes when pg released Arc.


I agree, some lisps are easier to install than others. But if you're a noob, how do you know which one to choose?


yeah mzscheme is super simple to install on osx. I had similar results to the poster with clisp though. It was the reason I pretty much gave up on common lisp. I could install it and get slime working up on XP no problem, but getting anything to work on osx was difficult. This was a long time ago too and I was running 10.3, so maybe things have changed by now. I haven't tried installing any common lisp system since I've upgraded to 10.5.


What linux were you using? On my Debian system, apt-get install clisp installs clisp, and apt-get install slime installs slime (and cl-swank).

I haven't tried slime with clisp, however, only SBCL. Any reason why you're using clisp and not SBCL?


SBCL isn't as happy as CLISP for w32


Installing Slime with SBCL 1.0.12 took just a few moments under OS X. I'd consider myself a newbie, but I did have emacs already installed.

Ports can indeed be a little messed up at times. For emacs, I find it fairly easy to just grab the latest source from gnu.org and build/install it with their instructions.


Installing Lisp? Hell, I have two Ubuntu boxes at home that I can’t connect to the internet.

There’s always the XP partitions for when I need to get things done, though.


Tell me about it. Despite all the flack XP gets/deserves, this one time, it just worked. Apple and Linux just didn't work.


I realize that in a way I am just restating what other people have said, but it seems very odd to me that this complaint would even come up in 2008. We are living in a time when Linux distributions have amazing package management that make Apple and Microsoft seem primitive in comparison. If your distribution can't do that, it's time to switch. I like Ubuntu personally. I have several different dialects of lisp installed and a slime environment in emacs. It took me a matter of literally seconds to install each one of them. Just apt-get install sbcl or if you're using a distribution that uses yum, then yum install sbcl. Or clisp, or whatever else you want to try using.


I never had any trouble getting clisp running under OS X. MacPorts is nice as long as the port you're after actually works. Although, now that I think about it, I do recall the clisp port being broken at some point. I just downloaded the tarball and ./configure;./build'ed it myself, though.

PLT Scheme is much easier, though. I'd highly recommend it for any variety of noob. I've installed it with no issues on OS X, Windows, and FreeBSD.


apt-get install sbcl


pacman -S clisp

I don't know what this fellow's problem was, clisp is fairly easy to install. Getting asdf to work properly might be a pain, but clisp itself was easy.


I bought my first Mac in 2002, a G3 iBook. I installed GCC via the standard OS X development tools, downloaded the source code for CLisp, did configure and make, and it built and ran "out of the box" the first time.

The build itself took something on the order of 20 minutes, but it worked without any issues.


You might try ReadyLisp for Mac OS at http://www.newartisans.com/software/readylisp.html.

It uses Aquamacs, SBCL and SLIME. Just drop the icon in the applications folder.


I really don't see how it could take two weeks to get clisp installed on linux unless you were trying to compile it from source, which I have never had to try.

Now trying to install various lisp packages you need, that's another story...


> Linux: two weeks, gave up when I got Clisp to run in the command line interface.

Are we talking Lisp noob, or Linux noob?

As the other posts indicate, use an apt-based distribution (Debian, Ubuntu), and do

    sudo apt-get install clisp slime


1) There's lispbox for linux too. 2) apt-get install sbcl: 30 seconds




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