Topic: Long term collegial community projects

[hawstom]

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Is there something I am not seeing that has prevented the AutoLISP community for a quarter century from developing the kind of collegial community projects that exist in so many other areas of the programming world?  After 25 years, I'm just getting started in my career.  I have been at civil engineering and AutoLISP for 25 years, I am 50 years old, and I figure I have another 40 years to enjoy engineering and programming.  I prefer to do it right.

I am also a professional freelance LAMP web programmer off and on.

So what am I missing?

• Is it because about the time anybody gets serious about programming she abandons AutoLISP/Visual LISP?
• Is it because all of us are nothing but a bunch of script kiddies (I don't believe that).

I am trying.  I started AutoCAD Wiki at wikia (see my signature) a few years ago.  And I have made occasional forays into AUGI, TheSwamp, StackExchange AutoLISP topics, and the Autodesk forums.  But so far it all seems like the Wild West still.

Tom

[roy_043]

Related:
https://www.theswamp.org/index.php?topic=45813.0

[MP]

Is there something I am not seeing that has prevented the AutoLISP community for a quarter century from developing the kind of collegial community projects that exist in so many other areas of the programming world?

Have seen so many try-outs -- ALL have failed.

Pretty much this -- a six member committee with 12 legs -- will try to walk in as many directions -- good luck.

[dgorsman]

There aren't any "coding standards" with C# either.  There are many different ways of getting things done, and while some have more merits than other it doesn't make those others "non standard".  Probably doesn't help the LISP community is quite freewheeling in general.  And those of us in a corporate environment cannot share code openly.  Anything we develop on company time is the IP of the employer, and sharing it (potentially helping the competition) would at a minimum be ethically questionable.

"Interoperability" doesn't exactly apply.  We all have unique situations and will inevitably need to break any of those "standards" in applying the work of others to the problem at hand.

[MP]

... those of us in a corporate environment cannot share code openly.  Anything we develop on company time is the IP of the employer, and sharing it (potentially helping the competition) would at a minimum be ethically questionable.

x 1e6! That's why I generally ante up conceptual code rather than solutions. It's frustrating because every day I see threads I would love to participate in -- and simply cannot.

[hawstom]

Thanks for this insight.  I've become aware that GPL (open source/FLOSS) probably will not work (yet?) for this community.  But there really is no excuse not to be having the respective businesses gladly chipping in for public domain libraries.  I am willing to re-orient from GPL to Public Domain.  And I expect to have decades yet to work on this.

... those of us in a corporate environment cannot share code openly.  Anything we develop on company time is the IP of the employer, and sharing it (potentially helping the competition) would at a minimum be ethically questionable.

x 1e6! That's why I generally ante up conceptual code rather than solutions. It's frustrating because every day I see threads I would love to participate in -- and simply cannot.

[hawstom]

Thanks a million for this related link.  2013 is just yesterday to me, and I will see what I can do over there.

Related:
https://www.theswamp.org/index.php?topic=45813.0

[hawstom]

But other mere human communities have succeeded.  It can be done.

Is there something I am not seeing that has prevented the AutoLISP community for a quarter century from developing the kind of collegial community projects that exist in so many other areas of the programming world?

Have seen so many try-outs -- ALL have failed.

Pretty much this -- a six member committee with 12 legs -- will try to walk in as many directions -- good luck.

[ChrisCarlson]

For all intents and purposes, AutoLISP has been dead for years. No sense banding up a small group to standardize something which isn't going to go anywhere or accomplish anything.

[hawstom]

That's what I kept telling myself for a long while.  But the evidence seems to point clearly to the contrary.  Obviously it is dead to you?  So I assume you will not be one of the sponsors of a community project. 

For all intents and purposes, AutoLISP has been dead for years. No sense banding up a small group to standardize something which isn't going to go anywhere or accomplish anything.

[hawstom]

To the extent there is a grain of truth to this, it would be a good argument for following a community like Common LISP with a perceived greater longevity.   But it seems that for many years the death of AutoLISP has been greatly exaggerated.

For all intents and purposes, AutoLISP has been dead for years. No sense banding up a small group to standardize something which isn't going to go anywhere or accomplish anything.

[ChrisCarlson]

I say dead in the terms that development of the raw functions have all but ceased. Right now we are just solving problems with an existing infrastructure, not creating or expanding the infrastructure. No company in their right mind will spend money to further develop VisualLISP, especially when that time and money would be more wisely spent in the .NET world of AutoDesk.

[hawstom]

Thanks for the clarification, Master_Shake.  Some here are definitely talking about developing Visual LISP.  And I suppose that in a certain sense any time you publish any program "for" Visual LISP you are developing Visual LISP.  In that sense, it seems that many companies are indeed spending money developing (for/in) Visual LISP.  No representation about whether anybody is in their right mind. 

[MP]

All the companies I've had the privilege to represent in the last 35+ years are in the engineering business -- not the software business. As such, a wide spectrum of challenges are realized every day, be it 11th hour surprises like "can you do some seemingly impossible task to these 5,000 drawings by Thursday?", issues with third party drawings and models to mass scale re-branding. Ad-hoc solutions typically need to be penned and executed within the hour. LISP is, and will continue to be the appropriate solution in these cases to the tune of ~ 1/4 million lines of code per year for years to come -- regardless of the fact I would prefer to work in C# and Python. Cheers.

[VovKa]

lisp programmers are quite rare species
they usually do not flock together