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.

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.

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.