Lisp Hackers: Zach Beane | Hacker News Reader

Lisp Hackers: Zach Beane

lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com

108 pointswglb12 comments

Good interview with Zach - I didn't realize that he lived in Maine.

I have mostly switched my Lisp development from Common Lisp to Clojure because that is what a customer wanted and now I am hooked on Clojure, but when do I use Common Lisp Zach's Quicklisp package management and installation system is very nice to use - I wish he had written it many years ago. In case you haven't tried Quicklisp yet: http://www.quicklisp.org/

BTW, if you work on OS X, and you want to get a good "IDE like" Common Lisp environment setup quickly, just install Clozure Common Lisp from Apple's AppStore (free), install Quicklisp, and set an alias like:

alias ClozureCL='/Applications/Clozure\ CL.app/Contents/MacOS/dx86cl64 &'

so you can quickly start the IDE in any directory.

My road to lisp has not been without bumps but after initially being inspired by pg's essays and reading the highly motivating Practical Common Lisp[1], quicklisp has greatly lowered the barrier to write real programs for me, installing packages is really easy now, if they are in quicklisp!

Cool interview with Zach, he's also extremely active in the #lisp IRC channel, can't thank him enough.

Regarding Clozure CL pointed out by Mark Watson: there was an "end user" app (though tiny) announced written with CCL available though the mac app store: Picture Window [2] Learning Common Lisp and Cocoa at the same time is very exciting, I hope to see more apps like that in the future (working on one myself).

[1] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

[2] http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/picture-window/id507262984?mt...

Like Zach and you, pg's essays (plus Steve Yegge's rants), influenced me to learn Lisp.

Great interview. I'm on Arc, but will add SBCL because of Zach. :) Also, I remember Steve Yegge writing about how he barked up the wrong tree with Scheme (for purity) when he realized that Common Lisp may be crufty but was what got things done: http://langnostic.blogspot.com/2010/09/yegge-strikes-back-fr...

Just to clarify; I am not in fact Steve Yegge (though I've been told I have a similar writing style), just a young lisper who read his essays.

Yes, you do have a similar writing style. From my list of Steve Yegge bookmarks, I was actually thinking of this one, http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab..., where he says this:

"Problem 1: Which Lisp? Sorry, folks, but you can't trivialize this one. Let's say I'm a new would-be Lisper, just finished walking down that long damn Road, and now that I'm here, I'm ready to start using it. Which "it" should I use? The answer is "it depends", and that's pretty unfortunate, because right there you've just lost users. With Python or Ruby or Java, you've only got one language to choose from. Or at least you can be comfortable that there's a single canonical version, and the rest (e.g. Jython) are highly experimental territory.

Pick Scheme, and you have to pick a Scheme. Pick Common Lisp, and you have to pick a Common Lisp. Heck, there are even two or three flavors of Emacs-Lisp out there.

Most newcomers eventually (and independently) decide the same thing: Scheme is a better language, but Common Lisp is the right choice for production work. CL has more libraries, and the implementations are somewhat more compatible than Scheme implementations, particularly with respect to macros. "

Since the full rant is tough on Lisp (and I like Lisp), and since you'd quoted most of the above, I was quick to pull the trigger on which to quote. Thanks for pointing it out.

"I don't write scripts that I call from the command line, I write functions that I call from the REPL, and use the slime and Emacs environment to create and interact with data". <3

A nice addition to my slime/Emacs environment (which is really a rediscovery for me after almost 10 years in IDEs like Eclipse) was iimage[1]. It converts image file name in the REPL to inline images, makes it very easy to prototype functions that create some graphics. E.g. I use vecto[2] (also written by Zach!) to produce a disk usage visualization and it shows up directly below the function call in Emacs :D

[1] http://www.netlaputa.ne.jp/~kose/Emacs/iimage.html

[2] http://www.xach.com/lisp/vecto/ or (ql:quickload 'vecto)

Oh, iimage is a great find thanks!

Great to see Zach getting some airtime. He's done a wonderful thing for Common Lisp users everywhere. Quicklisp's simplicity of use is deceptive. There were at least two previous attempts to create a "CPAN for Common Lisp" -- I'm thinking of ASDF-Install and Daniel Herring's LibCL, and I think there were more I've forgotten -- but none of them were as painless as Quicklisp.

If only he had the time to make screencasts of his day to day workflow (beside quicklisp demos) <o/

he is the guy who changed common lisp eco system. After quicklisp nobody ever gonna write abandonware. Thanks Mr. Beane.

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