Another issue is old books. I recently got value out of PAIP and On Lisp, and I still see people recommend A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. Stepping beyond CL for a second, car and cdr have even deeper roots; for example if someone is introduced to the wider lisp-like world through SICP they will also have to become comfortable with car and cdr.
I think another factor is that while the primitives for modifying readtables made it into the standard, an interface for using them in a way that limits the changes to the code you own (and not, say, additional libraries you load) is something that the users had to come up with.
It's not a lot of code or too complex to do that, but it's not obvious either and some people got it wrong or do it differently and I think that made reader modifications less common than they otherwise might have been.
I haven't looked too closely at the details but some of cl21's changes look like they might try to address this issue.
> we’re also applying similar ideas directly to our algorithms, such as tuning the accuracy of when our query broadening search improvements trigger
As you are doing this, please keep in mind that when you incorrectly broaden my query, and there is no immediately obvious way to re-narrow it, it costs you much more than you gain each time you correctly broaden my query.
I found that one to be powerful, but double edged. It's unpleasant to remember that ad when researching a serious situation that is likely to have a negative outcome.
>Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments.
That is not the primary reason that I want points back. I believe that allowing people to signal their opinion with public upvotes discouraged redundant posts, and that visible upvotes encouraged participants to let their arguments stand rather than creating unnecessarily deep threads.
A secondary issue is that votes were a valuable part of the signal in many "Ask HN" threads.
I have no idea why quicklisp isn't more up-to-date. If you need recent systems, I recommend managing your own set of libraries. Personally I have a "site-lisp" git repository where I include all the systems I use. This is really useful when I need to try bleeding-edge patches.
Thanks for the quick response, and thanks for adding the note to the documentation.
(As to the quicklisp version being a bit stale, it looks like the last CFFI tagged release is 13 months old. I updated my above post to point to the official git repository.)
Thank you for that; I recently tried to find out how he implemented his 30 second distraction-delay but I had misattributed the quote and so my search was unsuccessful. I think that the delay is a powerful idea.
The approach I'm experimenting with is a "productivity mode" toggle in a tiling windows manager which disables most of the windows manager commands, leaving me mostly stuck in whatever application(s) were already visible until I toggle it off. The toggle off function has a 30 second delay.
