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Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

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81–90 of 138 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#81
post #4

My personal choice would be Clojure. I learned Racket and Common Lisp but haven't used them build something production-grade yet. I don't even know how to properly build, deploy and monitor a Racket server yet. Racket is good but the toolchain and libraries are far behind Clojure. Especially Cider and Cursive are so great, and for libraries, there are a lot of solid ones like Ring/Compojure, interesting things like D…

I totally agree: I know Clojure and Racket and I think Clojure (and ClojureScript) are great for real, day to day, development; in fact, I use them at my job. I really don't know very much about Java, just the minimum needed

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#82
post #27

I wrote 100,000 lines of pure Clojure project, but never wrote Java. The understanding of Java only reaches the of understanding the C-like OO language syntax. This level is just enough to understand the Java API, so writing Clojure does not require Java knowledge. Clojure + JVM Ecology best fits your requirements. The ultimate programming methodology, perfect unity and simplicity ---- [The Pure Function Pipeline Dat…

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Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#83
post #4

My personal choice would be Clojure. I learned Racket and Common Lisp but haven't used them build something production-grade yet. I don't even know how to properly build, deploy and monitor a Racket server yet. Racket is good but the toolchain and libraries are far behind Clojure. Especially Cider and Cursive are so great, and for libraries, there are a lot of solid ones like Ring/Compojure, interesting things like D…

Am I wrong for saying that the Clojure community has not yet achieved consensus for things as simple as a build system? In some ways that seems like there would be more up-and-going friction than the JS build world.

This is fairly low down the priority list for a language, even if it's very convenient for the users. Most of the older languages don't even have defined build/packaging systems. It doesn't stop people from using C/C++.

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#84
post #11

If you don't want clojure, common lisp is the closest contender it has excellent tooling, performant compilers (sbcl) and mature package management however be prepared for rude shock when it comes to ecosystem support. Other languages make up for the lack of lisp's power by having excellent support of production grade libraries. You might struggle in doing soemthing basic like talking to the chrome browser via cdp, y…

For Clojure-on-golang there is https://joker-lang.org/

Also: https://www.ale-lang.org/

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#85
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Racket is good but the toolchain and libraries are far behind Clojure. Plus they plan to deprecate the entire language's syntax in the near future. Clojure is the way to go. It might not be perfect. But it works for most part.

I don't think they're planning to deprecate Racket's current syntax, since they say they'll still support it and that the existing syntax has already reached about a "local maximum."[0] Full excerpt from Matthew Flatt (as of about a month ago): > Racket's design and implementation is on solid ground, and from this point, it can continue to evolve and improve in many ways. No matter how Racket evolves, the community i…

I really don't think any one starting a project for production environment will be happy with being told that existing programs would run, but expect no fixes or enhancements from now on.

See how Perl lost programmer mindshare in the 2000s because of Perl 5 development had stalled in the favor of Perl 6.

Racket is(was) a language to do home work assignments. I guess even their very dedicated users would either switch to scheme or will just move to Clojure, with the current situation now.

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#86
post #30

If you want to use Common Lisp, the best implementation by far is Allegro Common Lisp from Franz ( https://franz.com/ ). This is the Lisp that gets used by research labs whose bread and butter is Lisp and AI work, and their tooling (runtime, libraries, debugger, IDE, etc) is the best bar none. I've used it for a while some years ago, and came away very impressed. However, it is a commercial product, and not free (but…

I always wondered about what people felt regarding Allegro Common Lisp vs LispWorks. Have you used both? Can you share your impressions?

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#88
[Chicken Scheme](https://call-cc.org) is fast, makes native binaries, and has a giant library of "eggs" covering most of the SRFIs. It's R5RS working its way towards R7RS. I've been using it for my "Python but fast" code for the last year or so, and it's one of the best production languages I've ever had.

[Chez Scheme](https://scheme.com) is super fast, and has the best REPL I've ever seen, but can't easily make binaries, and has limited external libraries. It's R6RS, which I prefer, but in the event you find other Schemers to work with about half of them are going to be annoyed it's not R7RS.

I found Racket to be substantially slower to compile and at runtime, the library is weird and not what I expect of a Scheme, and DrRacket IDE has some annoying quirks (it destroys your REPL environment every time you edit & run source, which is just monstrous). It's really heavily designed around educational uses, not so much production, and with the "Racket 2" changes it's likely to fragment and chase off any serious users.

Learning one Scheme (with SICP, TSPL, etc.) gets you 95% of the way with any Scheme; not so much with the three major LISPs (CLISP, Clojure, Arc). You'll still spend half your time reading library docs and SRFIs, which is where they all differ.

With any Scheme or LISP, you're going to face opposition from soi-disant "programmers" who don't like to learn anything about programming, and managers who don't want to support anything that isn't in the last 5 buzzwords they've heard, but if you own your own project, it's pretty great.

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#89
post #86
post #30

If you want to use Common Lisp, the best implementation by far is Allegro Common Lisp from Franz ( https://franz.com/ ). This is the Lisp that gets used by research labs whose bread and butter is Lisp and AI work, and their tooling (runtime, libraries, debugger, IDE, etc) is the best bar none. I've used it for a while some years ago, and came away very impressed. However, it is a commercial product, and not free (but…

I always wondered about what people felt regarding Allegro Common Lisp vs LispWorks. Have you used both? Can you share your impressions?

LispWorks is great for app development because of CAPI and its new iOS and Android runtimes (although you cannot use GUI framework on mobile devices). The IDE is also best in class. Add to that tree shaker and no royalty fee for runtimes. Performance is better than SBCL for “real” applications.

Allegro is the only Lisp that can somewhat compete with Java on the GC story. It’s simply the best Lisp you can use in the server. Even better than Clojure in that regard as idiomatic Clojure tends to run quite poorly and doesn’t allow for much low level tuning.

LispWorks for shipping binaries to clients. Allegro on the datacenter.

Re: Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?

#90
SBCL. Works everywhere, super fast, has an advanced compiler with helpful warning messages. You get a fully featured Common Lisp implementation with all the goodies like CLOS, threads, C interoperability, and so on. And of course no Java required (though there is a Common Lisp implementation (ABCL) written in Java).
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