LIlispm·Oct 16, 2018
> Maxima uses Common Lisp
Maxima is a direct port of Macsyma to Common Lisp and has been maintained in CL since the mid 80s. But it has not been re-architectured to take advantage of the many improvements in CL. Macsyma took advantage of the backwarts-compatibility of CL to Maclisp.
> The source code problems are a reflection of Lisp as is the source code of other major Lisp programs still being actively maintained
Many other Lisp programs have radically different source code / architecture from Macsyma. Check out the architecture of Reduce or Axiom. Maxima itself implements a language on top of Lisp.
Reduce is written in Portable Standard Lisp (PSL). It uses an algebraic Lisp (without s-expression syntax), written in (PSL).
Axiom implements an advanced statically typed language on top of Lisp and the original implementation makes EXTENSI
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VE use of literate programming.
If you want to see what actual CL specific code looks like, you would need to look at code bases which have been architectured for CL - after end 80s / early 90s onwards, when CLOS and a bunch of other things was added to the language.
One of the early great code bases for CL was the prototype implementation of CLOS with a meta-object protocol: Portable Common LOOPS.
https://github.com/binghe/PCL
There is a book which describes a simpler implementation - but with still quite nice code:
The Art of the Meta-object Protocol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_the_Metaobject_Prot...
https://github.com/binghe/closette
> It is more about how you go about your development and how you document your than about the language you use to write your code.
Lisp is called a programmer amplifier. Unfortunately bad programmers get amplified, too.
The software engineering research has had the goal to create better programming languages. That let to Pascal, Ada, ... and a bunch of other languages.
Lisp is the exact opposite. Lot's of freedom. With freedom comes responsibility. I have seen great Lisp code bases and also stuff I could not understand (basically write-once code).
For me the ability to write extremely descriptive Lisp code is a huge attraction. But I know that one can easily write large programs which are hard to understand - and not just because they lack documentation.