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Common Lisp Screenshots: today's CL applications in action

lisp-screenshots.org

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Re: Common Lisp Screenshots: today's CL applications in action

#21
post #8

[flagged]

Kind of yes and kind of no. Not many reasons to use Common Lisp I agree, but the Lisp idea itself has still something to offer that couldn’t be found in other systems.

I’m comfortable to declare that are not macros the most powerful thing of Lisp, but the concept of an environment. Still in 2026 many languages now implement the concept of evaluating the code and make it immediately available but nothing is like Lisp.

Lower level programming languages today they all still requires compilation. Lisp is one of the few that I found having the possibility to eval code and its immediately usable and probably the only that really relies heavily on REPL driven development.

Env+REPL imo is the true power still far ahead of other languages. I can explore the memory of my program while my program is running, change the code and see the changes in real time.

The issue is that CL is old, and Clojure is so close to be perfect if it wasn’t for Java. Clojure replaces Java, not CL and this is its strength but also its weakness.

Re: Common Lisp Screenshots: today's CL applications in action

#23
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are comparing a PL to a text generator. What are you on?

No, I'm not. I used to appreciate Lisp for the enhanced effectiveness it granted to the unaided human programmer. It used to be one of the main reasons I used the language. But a programmer+LLM is going to be far more effective in any language than an unaided programmer is in Lisp—and a programmer+LLM is going to be more effective in a popular language with a large training set, such as Java, TypeScript, Kotlin, or R…

My hammer is also solving problems. Still, hammering is not programming. LLMs are text generators.

Re: Common Lisp Screenshots: today's CL applications in action

#24
post #8

[flagged]

Can your LLM do that to a running system? Or will it have to restart the whole program to run the next iteration? Imagine you build something with long load-times. Also, your Lisp will always behave exactly as you intended and hallucinate its way to weird destinations.

An LLM can modify the code, rebuild and restart the next iteration, bring it up to a known state and run tests against that state before you've even finished typing in the code. It can do this over and over while you sleep. With the proper agentic loop it can even indeed inject code into a running application, test it, and unload it before injecting the next iteration. But there will be much less of a need for that kind of workflow. LLMs will probably just run in loops, standing up entire containers or Kubernetes pods with the latest changes, testing them, and tearing them down again to make room for the next iteration.

As for hallucinations, I believe those are like version 0 of the thing we call lateral thinking and creativity when humans manifest it. Hallucinations can be controlled and corrected for. And again—you really need to spend some time with the paid version of a frontier model because it is fundamentally different from what you've been conditioned to expect from generative AI. It is now analyzing and reasoning about code and coming back with good solutions to the problems you pose it.

Re: Common Lisp Screenshots: today's CL applications in action

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on a corporation to do your programming (and burning half the planet in the process, pardon the hyperbole) is the very opposite end of the "hacker" ethos where Lisp stands. Very surprising to see this sort of comment on HN, of all places.

Really? Feels like most Of HN lately is just “get on the AI hype train or get downvoted”

HN has never really walked the walk when it came to embodiment of the hacker spirit.

Before the incessant AI hype it was crypto, and before that it was JavaScript frameworks and before that it was ...

Re: Common Lisp Screenshots: today's CL applications in action

#27
post #21
post #8

[flagged]

Kind of yes and kind of no. Not many reasons to use Common Lisp I agree, but the Lisp idea itself has still something to offer that couldn’t be found in other systems. I’m comfortable to declare that are not macros the most powerful thing of Lisp, but the concept of an environment. Still in 2026 many languages now implement the concept of evaluating the code and make it immediately available but nothing is like Lisp.…

[deleted]

Re: Common Lisp Screenshots: today's CL applications in action

#28
post #8

[flagged]

Depending on a corporation to do your programming (and burning half the planet in the process, pardon the hyperbole) is the very opposite end of the "hacker" ethos where Lisp stands. Very surprising to see this sort of comment on HN, of all places.

Hackernews isn't really for that kind of hacker. Ever since Paul Graham became a startup wonk and VC, it's really more for "growth hackers". It was originally called "Startup News". For growth hackers, productivity, profitability, and scalability, in metrizable form especially, are far more important than romanticism about the lone hacker or small team of geniuses building something with just a laptop and their wits, or even moral concerns about the environment. (And LLMs burn less energy, and deliver more value, than crypto did. The energy consumption of AI has been way overblown.) And Lisp was created specifically to bring about this world. It was an early initial experiment in intelligence by symbolic computation—one which ultimately failed as we found that we can get a lot closer to intelligence by matmuling probability weights with good old-fashioned numeric code written in C++, Fortran, or maybe even Rust. So the long-term AI initiative which gave rise to Lisp ultimately spelt its end as well.

But the force-multiplier effects of LLMs are not to be denied, even if you are that kind of hacker. Eric S. Raymond doesn't even write code by hand anymore—he has ChatGPT do everything. And he's produced more correct code faster with LLMs than he ever did by hand so now he's one of those saying "you're not a real software engineer if you don't use these tools". With the latest frontier models, he's probably right. You're not going to be able to keep pace with your puny human brain with other developers using LLMs, which is going to make contributing to open source projects more difficult unless you too are using LLMs. And open source projects which forbid LLM use are going to get lapped by those which allow it. This will probably be the next major Linux development after Rust. The remaining C code base may well be lifted into Rust by ChatGPT, after which contributing kernel code in C will be forbidden throughout the entire project. Won't that be a better world!

Re: Common Lisp Screenshots: today's CL applications in action

#29
post #8

[flagged]

We have enough headlines about LLMs already. Let's just enjoy a cool Lisp site without some AI advocate telling us that non-AI things are irrelevant.

I'm not an AI "advocate". I'm telling y'all about how the world is. How it's going to be. I'm not happy about it, but we've crossed the threshold beyond which it's incomprehensibly silly not to factor the massive changes LLMs bring into how you work designing or implementing software. Lisp apps are cool, but as of 2026 they're fading into irrelevance. The paradigm of programming they represent is bound for the Computer History Museum and Usagi Electric's YouTube channel—not the reality of new software development. Even a legacy code base can be poured into an LLM, which will grok it instantly, answer your questions about it, and propose changes and improvements that will make it more performant, reliable, and comprehensible. I know this because I've done it.

Re: Common Lisp Screenshots: today's CL applications in action

#30
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not. I used to appreciate Lisp for the enhanced effectiveness it granted to the unaided human programmer. It used to be one of the main reasons I used the language. But a programmer+LLM is going to be far more effective in any language than an unaided programmer is in Lisp—and a programmer+LLM is going to be more effective in a popular language with a large training set, such as Java, TypeScript, Kotlin, or R…

My hammer is also solving problems. Still, hammering is not programming. LLMs are text generators.

The difference between the programming tools available before and LLM-based programming tools is the difference between your hammer and that of Fix-it Felix, which magically "fixes" anything it strikes. We are living in that future, now. Actually try it with frontier models and agentic development loops before you opine.
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