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The Common Lisp Cookbook

lispcookbook.github.io

11–20 of 28 posts

Re: The Common Lisp Cookbook

#11
post #2

Hi! I'm one of the (less active) maintainers. Four years ago I migrated the CL cookbook from sourceforge where it'd been gently resting for quite a few years (nearly a decade), and put it onto github, put together a CI system, and away it went. A few volunteers have been diligently working away on improving it, particularly `vindarel`, who has really taken the lead for content work in the last couple years as I've be…

Love seeing a Lisp Cookbook pop up on HN.

Had a general question about CL. What advantages does it have over things like Racket and Chicken? And how could I potentially pitch the language to a non-dev?

Re: The Common Lisp Cookbook

#12
post #9
post #2

Hi! I'm one of the (less active) maintainers. Four years ago I migrated the CL cookbook from sourceforge where it'd been gently resting for quite a few years (nearly a decade), and put it onto github, put together a CI system, and away it went. A few volunteers have been diligently working away on improving it, particularly `vindarel`, who has really taken the lead for content work in the last couple years as I've be…

Congratulations on the efforts. Is there any way to also get an epub out of it?

If you do, keep in mind that it's a continuous work in progress - the book keeps changing and a statically-generated ebook might not reflect that.

Re: The Common Lisp Cookbook

#13

For a Vim user, what is a good plugin to provide SLIME like paredit and REPL capabilities for programming in Common Lisp? Is there a clear winner plugin in Vim like there is SLIME for Emacs?

Steve Losh in his already-classic CL blog post [^1] suggests either Vlime or Slimv, quote: „If you’re like me and already have Vim burned too deeply into your fingers to ever get it out, I’d recommend Vim with Vlime. It will give you 80% of the experience you’ll get with Emacs.” If you want 100% of SLIME goodness without sacrificing vim, try spacemacs [^2]. I switched about two years ago and am very happy. [1]: http:…

> If you want 100% of SLIME goodness without sacrificing vim, try spacemacs.

Or just Evil + Evil-collection. Spacemacs is pretty bloated.

Re: The Common Lisp Cookbook

#14
post #2

Hi! I'm one of the (less active) maintainers. Four years ago I migrated the CL cookbook from sourceforge where it'd been gently resting for quite a few years (nearly a decade), and put it onto github, put together a CI system, and away it went. A few volunteers have been diligently working away on improving it, particularly `vindarel`, who has really taken the lead for content work in the last couple years as I've be…

Love seeing a Lisp Cookbook pop up on HN. Had a general question about CL. What advantages does it have over things like Racket and Chicken? And how could I potentially pitch the language to a non-dev?

It's defined by an ANSI standard; see (http://clhs.lisp.se).

There are a handful high-quality implementations, both free and commercial, many of which can generate efficient native code. When you can stick to the standard, you can reasonably expect your code to work across implementations and platforms.

The existence of the standard also means that you can often use code that is decades old with few changes. Furthermore, there are actually bodies of old code that you might want to use, because of its relatively common use in AI and academic communities in the 80s and 90s. See, for example (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/0.html).

It's designed to support interactive programming to a greater extent that any other language except perhaps Smalltalk. For example, the ANSI standard defines functions you can use to change the definitions of classes at runtime and have existing instances automatically updated to use the new definitions.

Like Racket and Chicken, it has a good library ecosystem. The ecosystem is supported by a good package manager (https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/). That package manager is in turn supported by a decent documentation-search site (http://quickdocs.org).

Several Common Lisp implementations support easy delivery of programs as a single, self-contained executable. The buildapp library (http://quickdocs.org/buildapp/) shows how this may be done in a cross-implementation way by supporting both SBCL and CCL.

The Common Lisp community has been around for decades, as have some of its prominent members. There's a ton of useful, practical knowledge in the community. It does have a bit of an unfriendly reputation, and that's sometimes deserved, but with some patience and persistence you'll find that it also contains friendly and helpful people who know a lot about the language and its effective use.

You can find a guide to the community here (https://common-lisp.net/community).

Re: The Common Lisp Cookbook

#15
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations on the efforts. Is there any way to also get an epub out of it?

If you do, keep in mind that it's a continuous work in progress - the book keeps changing and a statically-generated ebook might not reflect that.

Sure, I just find reading it on a kindle is more confortable than regular screens.

Re: The Common Lisp Cookbook

#16
post #2

Hi! I'm one of the (less active) maintainers. Four years ago I migrated the CL cookbook from sourceforge where it'd been gently resting for quite a few years (nearly a decade), and put it onto github, put together a CI system, and away it went. A few volunteers have been diligently working away on improving it, particularly `vindarel`, who has really taken the lead for content work in the last couple years as I've be…

Thank you and all of the contributors for this, it's basically an essential tool for me when writing common lisp.

Re: The Common Lisp Cookbook

#17
post #2

Hi! I'm one of the (less active) maintainers. Four years ago I migrated the CL cookbook from sourceforge where it'd been gently resting for quite a few years (nearly a decade), and put it onto github, put together a CI system, and away it went. A few volunteers have been diligently working away on improving it, particularly `vindarel`, who has really taken the lead for content work in the last couple years as I've be…

Love seeing a Lisp Cookbook pop up on HN. Had a general question about CL. What advantages does it have over things like Racket and Chicken? And how could I potentially pitch the language to a non-dev?

I'd pitch:

- it's all interactive and that's a productivity boost. Write a function, compile it (yes, compile function by function), see warnings or get a debugger on errors, try it right away. Same for web development. No process has to restart to test your changes.

- build a self-contained executable: a joy to deploy.

- strong typing, catches many common errors (and coming: an ML extension for CL: https://github.com/stylewarning/coalton, already used in a large Rigetti codebase)

- stable.

- fast

- take in every language feature you want with libraries

- parenthesis: they help to edit code by structure, by semantic units, instead of by line or characters.

- most flexible language. Like Python's decorators or context managers ? Yet they're limited and have their idiosyncrasies.

- unmatched object system, with generic functions that help maintain your logic small.

And there are libraries :] https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl

Re: The Common Lisp Cookbook

#18
post #9
post #2

Hi! I'm one of the (less active) maintainers. Four years ago I migrated the CL cookbook from sourceforge where it'd been gently resting for quite a few years (nearly a decade), and put it onto github, put together a CI system, and away it went. A few volunteers have been diligently working away on improving it, particularly `vindarel`, who has really taken the lead for content work in the last couple years as I've be…

Congratulations on the efforts. Is there any way to also get an epub out of it?

We discuss pdf generation here: https://github.com/LispCookbook/cl-cookbook/issues/176
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