The PLT Scheme advantage

I was doing a lot of builds at work today. While waiting for it to complete, I decided to spend some time coding in Lisp. Clozure CL host irc logs for #ccl, #scheme and #lisp on their website. I thought it would be cool idea to download the logs for a particular date by writing a CL program. 

What it turned out to be was a huge waste of time. I decided to try the trivial-http library. I downloaded the tarball. Then I didn't quite know how to install it. Some amount of googling gave me links to asdf-install. I then spent the next couple hours trying to get it work. It doesn't work. Checked on #lisp, and #ccl but no responses. 

In frustration, I turned on DrScheme and grokked the documentation. There is a net/url library that is shipped with PLT Scheme. Two minutes later my code looked like so

(require net/url)

(display-pure-port (get-pure-port (string->url "http://ccl.clozure.com/irc-logs/lisp/2009-12/lisp-2009.12.28.txt")))

I'm not sure if any other scheme (other than maybe chicken) would have allow me to get going so quickly.  I doubt whether any further example is required for a batteries included distro of CL. 

Update: Finally got something in CL - a TCP stream descriptor. So, we aren't there yet. But here is how it goes. 

1. Don't bother about asdf-install - it takes care of downloading asdf packages in order and compiling them. To use ASDF packages, we don't need asdf-install.
2. Download trivial-http and usocket asdf packages and untar them. I put them in my libcl installation. My libcl is in d:/programs/libcl. It doesn't need to be here, but having it here makes my directory structure clean.
3. Update ccl-init.lisp for asdf:*central-registry* to see the new asdf locations. Eg. for usocket we do - (pushnew #P"d:/programs/libcl/usocket/" asdf:*central-registry* :test #'equal) 
4. At the REPL compile the new asdf files. E.g for usocket we do - (asdf:operate 'asdf:compile-op 'usocket)
5. Next at the REPL load the compiled asdf. We need to load only trivial-http. ASDF automatically loads usocket - (asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op 'trivial-http)
6. We can now see that that trivial-http is available by doing (list-all-packages).
7. Finally, (require 'trivial-http) and (trivial-http:http-get "http://ccl.clozure.com/irc-logs/lisp/2009-12/lisp-2009.12.28.txt")

What we have now is just a stream. We now need to read the stream. That's for later.

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