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Comment by runevault | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I've just been blind to it but feels like CL has been getting mentioned more on HN lately (I do remember the early days when Lisp/Scheme/Arc were mentioned a lot since this site runs on Arc). Actually gone through some of that Common Lisp the hard way that was linked here not terribly long ago.

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I spent some time this year using Common Lisp. It's expanding my mind and I see all sorts of alternate histories. I'm starting to feel very curious about SmallTalk for that same reason.

There have been a lot of attempts to revitalize Lisp. Clojure is the one that comes to mind, and I do like that language. My personal take CL simply has a marketing problem. The name sounds so stale and boring that I never thought to pick it up. "Common" may have been a word that invoked unity in a fractured ecosystem at some point in time, but today it communicates "Nothing Special".

It's too married to emacs right now

I'd say it is worth trying VSCode and Alive, I've enjoyed the little bit I've done with it so far, has hot keys for things like compile file or just compile current form.

What's wrong with vlime?

Exposure to Smalltalk was very helpful in getting Objective C.

I completely agree about seeing more CL related topics here on HN. I thought since I am actively learning CL that it was due to "frequency illusion" [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

What are you using to learn?

Mostly books. Old school ;-)

Toureztky's Common Lisp A Gentle Intro to Symbolic Programming Norvig's PAIP Seibel's Practical Common Lisp Graham's ANSI Common Lisp

I'd like to snag a copy of Sonya Keene's book on CLOS but hesitant to drop $50+ for a used book.

oh man you remind me I have a copy of PAIP I never fully worked through...

Also Lisp in Small Pieces (I went through a helluva lisp phase a long time ago but never got as deep as I should have).

> Common Lisp the hard way that was linked here not terribly long ago

Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34326311

So how is programming in Common Lisp these days? I know a bit of Clojure/Fennel, but I feel like the Common Lisp ecosystem is a lot more fractured(I might very well be wrong tho)?

Feels alright though I'm still early in relearning it. Going through that Learning CL the hard way[1] plus grabbed On Lisp and slowly working through that as well. I also need to really mess with Quicklisp which I set up to give me a package manager. Alive is a damn good plugin for CL on VS Code if you don't wanna go down the Emacs hole.

It is worth mentioning Hard Way still has a bunch of holes in it, like I got to the chapter on vectors and it is basically blank

[1] - https://llthw.common-lisp.dev/

Same, still trying to get a good book that's pragmatic and for experienced developers. Many starts from the basics, or don't even talk about stuff like Quicklisp and ASDF.

I want a book to make production-ready software in Common Lisp, not to faff around. The Paul Graham "On Lisp" book seems excellent, and I'll dive into it next.

FYI PG put the PDF up on his site so you can just legally download it.

I have bookmarked this version with restored images: https://www.lurklurk.org/onlisp/onlisp.html

Yea this is a thing too, I have no idea what is recommended in the current ecosystem. SBCL + Quicklisp? I don't even really know what ASDF is.

If you want true common lisp SBCL is probably the most universally known, and yeah everything I've read indicates one of the first things you should do is download and run the quicklisp setup so you have it working with your environment. Though it is funny how Hard Way did it during initial setup but then hasn't used it at all and I'm a chunk of the way through. Even as a beginner book I'd probably briefly touch on packages because it is so important to modern development.

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ ? Implementations, Quicklisp and ASDF explained

Thank you. I have come across your posts about moving from Python to CL, and the work you've been doing with the cookbook and other libraries is very much appreciated.

Your recent efforts might be one of the reasons there is a little bit of Lisp hype on this forum lately :-)

Thank you! That is a very nice resource

I think "Practical Common Lisp" is pretty good. The wikipedia for it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practical_Common_Lisp

A direct link to the PDF is here too. https://github.com/ccceye/computer-book/blob/master/Practica...

Another interesting one is "Land of Lisp", https://www.amazon.com/Land-Lisp-Learn-Program-Game/dp/15932...

It's more theoretical, but kind of fun. It's a touch more academic (IMHO) than Practical Common Lisp, but pretty good.

It's not very fractured, especially in open source as many "common libraries" support most implementations.

It very much helps that there's a single standard that is quite rich (unlike Scheme) which makes for much easier portability between implementations, to the point that somewhat common repeated trope was developers using one implementation for faster iteration and another for deployment (for example, CCL for development and SBCL for faster code in deployment, or CCL/SBCL for development and ECL for target deployment).

People sticking to their good intentions for the new year, maybe? Common Lisp is a pretty great language, though (especially with defstar and alexandria).

I actually don't know defstar or alexandria but I'm very rusty on CL (touched it I dunno a decade ago? along with a bit of time off and on with Racket scheme and Clojure at various points).

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