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Unix and Common Lisp are similar in many ways:

1. Both are operating systems

2. Both are conceptually simple.

3. There is always nice command that does what you want but you somehow forget it. I can't believe that Common Lisp has just 900+ symbols but I routinely forget some of them when programming.

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My favorite part is when you implement something you could've had running in a minute or so, but instead developed it for hours or days and it's still not as good as the existing solution. I often get that with C and libraries. There has to be a better way to search through existing stuff which is good and proven, not just for C of course.

Haskell has hoogle [0], that lets you search by type signature. If you already know roughly what kind of function you want, it's a lot easier to sift through a tiny handful of (or even a single) functions that match a given type signature.

ISTR Forth had something similar, or maybe I'm just thinking that in Forth, words are almost uniquely defined by their stack annotations.

[0] http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/

Indeed! Apropos is our friend.

Or if apropos isn't on your system, man -k does the same thing.

... I think it works when apropos isn't installed. Possibly it just calls out to it.

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