A Road to Common Lisp (2018)

I wanted to love Common Lisp, but as a Vim user every day was a struggle. One typically uses plugins (Slimv, Vlime) that contort buffers in bizarre ways in order to simulate the SLIME EMacs REPL — if not, they will lose out on the interactive development experience that is so central to CL. Being tied to either EMacs or an enterprise solution like LispWorks to get the full language experience was ultimately a non-starter. I’d love for someone to…

Getting a taste of Common Lisp in college is probably the only useful thing I got out of that boondoggle. It left a seed in my brain that eventually encouraged me to try Clojure. Clojure ended up launching my career further than I'd ever expected while making my work life significantly more pleasant. Lisp is a gift and I am extremely thankful for it.

A bit too naive. > Part of Common Lisp's practicality comes from its extensibility. No one has been clamoring for a new version of the specification that adds features because Common Lisp's extensibility allows users to add new features to the language as plain old libraries, without having to alter the core language. Almost everybody has been clamoring some extensions to be standardized because of extensive balcanization in its various diverging implementations: sockets, process management, threads, ffi. You dont…