Re: Why :USE sucks in the Common Lisp package system

[phoe]

On 10.05.2020 00:01, Daniel Colascione wrote:
> It's just as easy to use local nicknames here though. I still haven't
> seen a compelling case for :use that outweighs the risk of imprudent
> use. Why is prefix-less import of some internal utils package so
> important?  If the utils package and the user of the utils package
> have the same author, they can just share a namespace instead of one
> using the other.

Sure, that is a convincing argument. The single compelling use case for
:USE is not needing to type CL:IF everywhere you want to type IF,
CL:DEFUN everywhere you want DEFUN, et cetera; literally everything else
is achievable via package-local-nicknames instead of that.

The big issue is that decades- or even years-old code authors did not
have PLNs at their disposal, and even though they were available in SBCL
for a long time, they were not widespread in the CL ecosystem. Now the
situation has changed and they are close enough to be supported by all
contemporary alive implementations - the people who wrote Lisp code back
in the day were unable to use such luxuries while maintaining readable
code of their own libraries.