>>11
To be clear: I don't call, say, PicoLisp code or Scheme code 'Lisp code' but I don't call CL code 'Lisp code' either. But I suppose I should clarify further.
I don't have a problem with people calling CL 'Lisp' without adjectives — I'm really not that stuck up. What bothers me is when people consider other Lisps to be 'off-topic' and get upset when you refer to anything but CL and its direct descendants as 'Lisp' and I find the sole reason of backwards compatibility to be exceedingly silly. It's no different than saying "you can't call your language Smalltalk unless it's a superset of Smalltalk-80" or "it's not a Forth unless it can run ANS Forth programs."
The following excerpt from WikiWikiWeb gives an example of what I'm talking about:
The purpose of CommonLisp is to unite the Lisp community; portions of SchemeLanguage went into the formulation of CommonLisp. Now that CommonLisp exists (and has existed for many years), continued use of any other Lisp dialect, other than in research or in legacy applications (such as use of EmacsLisp in EmacsEditor), undermines that unity and fractures the community. In other words, CommonLisp ought to subsume further development on other Lisp dialects--including Scheme. Nobody uses MacLisp any more for production code; nobody should use Scheme anymore either. If the Scheme community wishes to develop separately from the Lisp community and continue to be an actively-supported production language, they should do so without enjoying the benefits of association with Lisp, as they aren't contributing anymore. In other words, this argument is saying that "Lisp" is exactly "Common Lisp", anything else is excluded. (And since Common Lisp is unlikely to evolve in any substantial way, this means that Lisp is forever frozen at what CL is now.)
It's definitely not a majority opinion (which is why I opt to call them dorks instead of referring to the entire community) and this kind of gatekeeping certainly isn't exclusive to Lisp. But I've come across this sentiment in several Lisp communities such as comp.lang.lisp
, /r/lisp
and #lisp
on Freenode (which is exclusive to CL; not even ISLISP, which is practically a CL subset, is allowed — ##lisp
is the generic Lisp family channel) and I honestly find it to be pointless and annoying.
This is why I said >>10 as an off-hand remark in response to >>7.