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Comment by mishmash | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably going to buy this, but would anyone be able to explain the state of programming Lisp on Mac OS X?

The state of Lisp programming on OS X is quite good. Things I've tried:

  * Clozure MCL, excellent Mac integration no need to use Emacs
  * LispWorks, good Lisp IDE, free for personal use, no 
    need to use Emacs
  * PLT Racket, good Scheme IDE, no need to use Emacs
  * Clojure, Cake make's it a cinch, you can use TextMate

If you're going to go with Emacs, for Common Lisp, Cocoa Emacs 23 plus Slime is great, Cocoa Emacs 23 plus Quack for Scheme is great.

On Mac there's MCLIDE: http://mclide.in-progress.com/

It's not Emacs but it speaks SWANK, so it works with a bunch of Lisps.

"no need to use Emacs" Not being able to use Emacs is a feature?

Worth telling because Emacs is a kickass IDE for Lisp and most people use it, but it's kind of scary to beginners.

If you're going to go with Emacs, any of these options are suddenly much brighter ;-)

I currently write clojure on a macbook[1]. It's an ideal setup. I prefer it to my past linux setups (maybe just personal preference). The core setup is bash/emacs/slime/lein. I think it comes down to being an emacs user more so than which operating system.

In general any *nix based system with bash will always be easier to get lisps setup and running(including OSX). This is due to most lisp developers already using such setups.

In my opinion the key to successful lisp development setup is having an integrated REPL. So whatever you do try for that. It would be easy enough to create a setup on OSX that didn't have this and thus was a difficult setup on an otherwise capable OS.

Are you interested in doing GUI or native development on OSX? If so you'll likely end up using FFI of some sort. This is doable but could be hard without some exposure to C/C++/Objective C.

Also it's common practice in the community to just roll your own instead of modifying something that is only a partial fit. I think all the lisp communities have improved on this but it's still a noticeable difference. This can be frustrating if you are coming from a language where the code is more often than not already in a library or framework somewhere. You just have to find it and call it.

NOTE: Windows users can use msys/msysgit/Console to get a functional bash terminal running on windows.

[1] http://clojure.org/

Thanks for the comments. It seems like Lisp is one of those languages everyone should learn at some point, and it's likely past that time for me. I don't really have a specific idea for GUI apps, and am already heavily invested in Cocoa for those anyway, so I'd probably be looking at it to build a custom static site generator idea that's been floating around for a while.

Clozure[1], formally know as OpenMCL, is a great CL implementation for Mac and other popular platforms.

I've been running Clozure and Aquamacs[2] editor for the past two years and I can only say good things about both.

[1] http://www.clozure.com/clozurecl.html

[2] http://aquamacs.org/

Disclaimer: I'm just starting to get into Lisp, myself.

I don't think it's any better or worse than any other platform, really. Using a package manager like Homebrew[1], it's easy to get SBCL installed and running. Gambit reportedly has good support for integrating into Objective-C applications on the Scheme side. There's also Nu[2], which lets you do Cocoa programming in a Lispish language.

[1] https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

[2] http://programming.nu/index

PG uses a mac book air: http://paul.graham.usesthis.com/

maybe we can infer that Lisp (or Arc) works well on it.

The main requirement for Arc is an older build of plt, which works wonderfully on OS X

Arc 3.1 works with the current version http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10254

That is interesting. Apparently he uses vi, not emacs.

Offtopic: interestingly, PG's requests in "What would be your dream setup?" were actually realized by Apple.

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