I see that LWN has got its predictions for what happens to Linux in#

Wed, 31 Dec 2003 16:56:22 +0000

I see that LWN has got its predictions for what happens to Linux in 2004 up. Inspired by that, I'm going to make some predictions of my own about Lisp in 2004

• 2004 will not be the "Year of Lisp". When was the Year of Linux? The Year of the Internet? The Year of the LAN (remember that one?) Exactly. 2004 will be the year that some number of people suddenly realise they can use Lisp to solve their problems, and it will be a bigger number than had the same realisation last year, and 2005 will have more still. But that doesn't make either (any) of them the Year of Lisp.

• SBCL will get callback support, and threads on some non-x86 platform (most likely PPC). It's kind of cheating for me to make SBCL predictions, though, so expect more when I've talked to Christophe and we've decided what we want to do.

• Sometime after it gets its CVS repository back on the net, CMUCL will release 19a, which will have approximately what the current CMUCL CVS versions have in them. The CMUCL project suffers hosting problems on an approximately two-yearly basis, so will not seriously drop off the net again until 2005.

• Gary Byers will tire of the low takeup of OpenMCL 0.14 pre-releases and will label it an official release so that users actually get it and start beating on the native threads support seriously. No major problems will result.

• SLIME will replace ILISP as the "default" emacs interface for free Lisps. It will gain thread support.

• MCCLIM will progress from its current status as the project that everyone admires and nobody actually uses, to a new position as a project that everyone installs to play with the Listener, but doesn't then use for anything serious. This will not change until a real application (probably Maxima) is released that depends on it. Lots of talking and approximately no hacking will be done on a CLIM-based editor/IDE, and a CLIM Gtk backend.

• A "major" Linux distribution (i.e. Red Hat or SUSE) will follow the lead set by Debian, Gentoo and Slackware, and put a decent general-purpose CL system (CMUCL or SBCL) into their distribution

• They'll screw it up by having someone do it who doesn't actually use Lisp, so it'll be (a) an old version, (b) a brand-new release which is missing the rushed post-release patches that actually make it work, (c) compiled with really dumb compilation options (SBCL without threads, or CMUCL with incorrect source paths, or similar), or (d) missing bits (like the FreeBSD SBCL port has no contrib). Maintainers of whichever CL it is will bemoan the fact that the distro fouled it up so badly. The distro hacker will claim that he asked for advice on IRC/usenet but everyone was too busy arguing about politics and/or Norway to give him an answer. People will look back through Dejanews or the IRC logs and find his question, which was written at the end of a 16 hour day wrestling with some out-of-date tarball from Sunsite and started with "Why is this stuff all so totally undocumented, broken, and completely fucking incomprehensible. Lisp sucks" and escalated from there. Everyone will take sides. A bug will be reported in the vendor's bug reporting system, which will be closed with the tag 'WONTFIX' or local equivalent.

  (Note: it doesn't have to go that way. Red Hat and SUSE hackers are warmly invited to introduce themselves as such on the relevant development lists and ask for packaging advice. We're friendly enough if we don't think we're being trolled, and it's in all our interests to get decent quality packages into the major distributions)

• comp.lang.lisp will become still more offtopic and still less useful. At least one defender of proprietary Lisp development and one prominent free Lisp hacker will blow up loudly and publicly and swear that he is leaving {cll, usenet, Lisp, software} forever. Nobody will believe him, though many will claim to.

  (Hmm. How public have I been about my departure from cll? I expect it's temporary until I get broadband sorted out again, but after an hour playing with Dejanews yesterday I have to admit I'm not missing it much. But it's still 6 hours before 2004 as I write this, so you should probably look for another free Lisp hacker anyway)

• Peter Siebel's book will be released, making many people happy and me jealous.

• Sourceforge will suffer some major and long-term screwage, affecting many free Lisp projects. By the time it returns to normal service

  • SBCL and ECL will have moved elsewhere

  • CCLAN as a brand name will have been largely forgotten, but asdf and asdf-install will be moved to common-lisp.net.

  • ILISP probably won't have noticed.

• I haven't heard anything about ILC 2004 yet; I don't know what the plans are. I do know that Ray de Lacaze did an absolute ton of work last year and I was sorry to miss it. Whether ILC happens or not this year, I predict more Lisp presence at other conferences, including LSM/RMLL, UKUUG, LinuxTAG etc.

• Probable vapourware in 2004: CL-Emacs (unless Gilbert resurfaces or Luke Gorrie gets into it), productized cirCLe, an SMTP server with Bayesian spam filtering, another LispOS and another attempt at a c.l.l FAQ