Getting Started in Common Lisp

Modern IDEs don’t improve the feedback loop much unfortunately, more often it’s quite the opposite. They are slow, bloated and distracting. Some of them might be good at renaming one’s variables as part of their refactoring offer, but otherwise the situation is quite often bleak.

SBSL+SLIME+Emacs usually put one in the flow state in no time. That’s what keeps amazing me and keeps me productive.

And then, Claude seems to be quite alright discussing tricky Common-Lisp-related stuff.

For vim users, there's vim-slime:

https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime

I don't know if it's as powerful as the real thing, but it allows you to "send" your current vim line or paragraph to a tmux instance running a lisp interpreter, essentially. Very useful.

I've been writing Lisp code off and one since the 80s. The standard for Common Lisp has to be sbcl but the REPL is pretty minimal. The available packages tend to be more limited than Go which I've been using a lot lately. I did find a way to have a more functional REPL and also have access to all the Go packages by writing SLIP (https://github.com/ohler55/slip). Yes I know this is a plug for SLIP and if that offends anyone I apologize. The reasons mentioned for developing it are valid though and I've managed to use Lisp for almost all the data mining and processing tasks.

For people that use Lisp extensively, do you find the chording requirements of parentheses (shift-9 or shift-0) annoying? It feels like very bad ergonomics, considering how frequently the characters are used.

Do you use a keyboard with mappings to make it easier? Rely on the editor to insert them for you?

  (defun hello (name)
    (format t "Hello, ~A!" name)) ;; 6 parens, 6 shift keys

  def hello(name):
    print(f"Hello, {name}") # 4 parens, 2 curlies, 6 shift keys

  void hello(char* name) {
    printf("Hello, %s\n", name);
  } // 4 parens, 2 curlies, 6 shift keys

  print("Hello World");

  (print "Hello World")

i use slimv instead

i think the powerful feature is not (only) merely sending code to repl

but the suggestion for function's parameter as the function is updated to repl

for example: (defun xyz (a &option b &rest c &key d) ) ;then send this with ,d (vim+slimv) to swank server

the next time i type (xyz ... vim status bar conveniently states: (xyz a &optional b &rest c &key d)

both happen whether i start typing (xyz in repl or in vim; that's it, the function parameters show up as suggestions in repl and in editor

I've been waiting for ages for a Lisp that allows me to develop in one running system, creating minimized images with a tree shaker to distribute parts of the system for production when needed, and that never came (at least not with an affordable license, I don't know about the commercial Lisps). People recommend Smalltalk for this but that's not a Lisp. Eventually, I've switched to Go because if I have to write individual files in Emacs anyway, I can just as well use a more static language.

I’ve read a few scheme books over the years, and recently bought p.g’s book…

Though because I’ve had nothing to actually apply it to, it just gets forgotten about - that was until I decided to go all in on Emacs again about a year ago. And fancy that - I’ve written so much lisp (Elisp) in the past few months that even diving into Emacs extensions is t daunting anymore for me.

Want to get started? Force yourself to use it every day. Throw yourself in the deep end - start from a vanilla Emacs setup, and each time something bugs you, stop and figure it out (what’s the function, variable, face, etc that needs changing, or do you have to write a few function to get what you want done) - it’s a friggen superpower!!!

Way too heavy. Just install sbcl & vim.

Mark: So how do I get started in Common Lisp?

Nolan: That's the neat thing—you don't.

One of the interesting and, depending on your perspective, perhaps unfortunate side effects of LLM-assisted development becoming the standard is that LLMs almost completely disincentivize choosing an unpopular language for serious work. Due to the much higher volume of training data, you're better off using TypeScript, Go, or Rust (or Swift if you're in Apple-land or Kotlin if you're in Android dev hell). Those languages with an LLM will make you far more productive than even an "expressive" language like Lisp.

Plus there are complete, modern IDEs for those that let you get started right from the jump, rather than having to build your own IDE out of Emacs and assorted parts before you can actually develop your application.