9 ms·

State of the Common Lisp Ecosystem

199 points by dwc 11y ago

WalterGR 11y ago
The fact that it’s built on Emacs is a problem, as telling a new user they have to learn Emacs before using SLIME (which is not strictly true) is a significant artificial barrier to entry. Yes, it is true. It's ridiculous to expect a person new to a language to also learn Emacs. It is absolutely a significant barrier to entry.
- melling 11y ago
  It takes 15 minutes to learn Emacs at a basic level.
  - eudox 11y ago
    I think about three years went by between the first time I opened the Emacs tutorial and when I started using Emacs seriously. So, sure, the barrier to entry doesn't look so high once you're past it, but insurmountable before. Specially when the official tutorial tells new users to move around the file using obscure key combinations and even the standard copy/paste/kill key combinations don't work.
    - melling 11y ago
      The standard copy and paste work for me. Just use the arrow keys and page up/down keys to navigate. Skip the complicated stuff and pretend you're using Notepad.
      - WalterGR 11y ago
        Skip the complicated stuff and pretend you're using Notepad. No? Being a beginner to Lisp doesn't imply being a beginner to programming. Why would an experienced non-Lisp programmer find being subjected to a Notepad-like development experience worth even the slightest consideration? (EDIT: And non-experienced non-Lisp programmers also have a preferred tool-set, which is likely superior to Notepad.) Emacs can be great - to some people. The "You have to use Emacs to program in Lisp" meme is not great.
        melling 11y ago
        So don't use it like Notepad. Give it the full hour. And I doubt if you have to use Emacs to write in Lisp. Let me Google it for you: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/94792/using-vim-for-lisp-development http://stackoverflow.com/questions/94792/using-vim-for-lisp-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19891
        pvaldes 11y ago
        "you have to use Emacs to program in lisp..." You don't. Nobody stops you to use vim and fire a clisp repl instead if you want. Older but much friendly to start than sbcl. Emacs as a barrier to lisp is an interesting concept. To me was exactly the opposite.
        WalterGR 11y ago
        You don't. Nobody stops you to use vim and fire a clisp repl instead if you want. Of course. And there could very well be a service that accepts handwritten source code via the post, transcribes it, executes it, and mails you the output. In context, I'm responding to the following: • the article's preference for beginner-friendly suggestions (e.g. don't overwhelm beginners with an abundance of choice) • the specific text I quote in my original comment above, and • the fact that Emacs+SLIME is the de facto standard answer to every Lisp beginner who asks for an IDE.
        pvaldes 11y ago
        "Emacs+SLIME is the de facto standard answer to every Lisp beginner who asks for an IDE" Is a good advice because emacs is awesome, multipurpose, and free. But, you have choices. You could use also slimv, the "slime for vim" for example. And Vim is also awesome, multipurpose and free. If you are a total beginner that do not want to learn neither vim nor emacs (something that you will regret when you finally learn one of them some years later) just forget all about superior modes, fire a clisp repl in bash and use your favourite text editor to write and copy-paste. If you want a simple plan to start, is pretty simple If you want it more simple, just save some bucks and buy a commercial lisp, like allegro for example that comes with a nice IDE: allegro-composer. You obtain what you pay for.
      - masukomi 11y ago
        use what's possibly the world's most powerful editor... but pretend you're using notepad... ...
        melling 11y ago
        Just to get started. Many people are intimidated by Emacs because there is so much to learn. If it scares you, start off simple then let your knowledge grow organically.
        fein 11y ago
        I've been coding in emacs for years and still have no idea what I'm doing. Lisp makes sense, but I'm aware that there are thousands of features in emacs that I'm unaware of. It makes life MUCH worse switching from linux to osx emacs and back though.
    - yellowapple 11y ago
      > Specially when the official tutorial tells new users to move around the file using obscure key combinations If you're a Mac user, they're actually - in all likelihood - not that obscure; you can use the same exact key combinations in pretty much every OS X application. The built-in tutorial is indeed exceissively comprehensive, but those "obscure" keybindings are incredibly useful, particularly C-a and C-e (much faster than using "Home" or "End", respectively), which is why they're covered. And really, the Emacs bindings aren't any harder than the CUA bindings; they're just different, and can be easily gleaned (in graphical Emacs installations, at least) by poking around in the menu and looking at the shortcuts for certain commands, like opening/saving files or killing/yanking. > and even the standard copy/paste/kill key combinations don't work. This is easily fixable by going to Options -> Use CUA Keys, which enables C-x for kill, C-v for yank, and C-c for copy. OS X users can also just use Command-C/V/X like normal, with or without this option enabled.
      - vsync 11y ago
        > And really, the Emacs bindings aren't any harder than the CUA bindings; they're just different, and can be easily gleaned Not only that, they're older (i.e., Emacs was there first).
      - engi_nerd 11y ago
        > If you're a Mac user, they're actually - in all likelihood - not that obscure; you can use the same exact key combinations in pretty much every OS X application. Apple doesn't go out of their way to really point this out. Ordinary Mac users have no idea about this. None!
        na85 11y ago
        That's because ordinary Mac users need to be spoonfed.
    - na85 11y ago
      It's easy to learn C-x C-s to save, C-x C-c to quit, C-x C-f to open a file. That's how I got by with emacs for about 6 months, just because I liked the tab/indent behaviour so much. Then after that it's easy to learn the C-x chords for splitting windows, and you're at about the level where I used emacs for about 5 years, with maybe some C-c C-c to compile things. Honestly emacs is not that hard and you can be pretty productive with just the bare minimum. I still don't use the arcane commands to move the cursor around. I don't even know what they are. I use the arrow keys and pgup/pgdown.
  - jacobmoe 11y ago
    Basic editing does take 15 minutes. In 20 minutes you realize that Emacs out-of-the-box is embarrassingly bad relative to modern editors, and to justify using it you'll have to go deeper. A year later, you start to feel like a somewhat proficient user.
    - pvdebbe 11y ago
      What's a modern editor? Newest stable version of Emacs (24.5) is from April 2015, 4 months old. The fresh Emacs 25 is cooking.
      - jacobmoe 11y ago
        I'm an Emacs fanboy, and I'm already using 25. The fact is, if someone is just looking for a text editor and not a new hobby, I would recommend Atom. The editor that you have after using Emacs for 15 minutes is not very good. The editor you have after a year of dedicated use is amazing.
  - maehwasu 11y ago
    OP is getting hate, but I write a lot of Clojure code in Emacs, and I find the following commands cover 97%+ of my usage, maybe more. For config I use Emacs Live out-of-the-box, and remap Command on OSX to be my Ctrl. That's it. C-a, C-e, C-b, C-f, C-p, C-n, C-v, M-v for line/screen maneuvering. C-o for Ace-jump to go to the start of any words I see on the page. C-d to delete. C-s to search for words not on the page. C-k, C-y, and also how to use them with paredit to yank whole s-expression chunks. Buffer switching and killing. File saving and opening. I teach the above to any friends who want to learn Emacs/Clojure/LISP, leaving out a few other features like whole word deletion and more advanced paredit. With halfway decent aptitude and a little practice, they become productive very quickly (within a few hours, which is a pretty good investment relative to "normal" text editors in my book). Also, you can use a lot of the commands for normal OSX text editing, which further improves the investment.
- eudox 11y ago
  I should have expanded on the 'not strictly true' bit: for a while I wrote code on Sublime Text and used the REPL from SLIME, with the windows side by side, as SublimeREPL was pretty terrible. And I was fairly productive, too. Eventually I just caved and learned Emacs.
- deleted 11y ago
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- guiomie 11y ago
  I tried learning lisp with SLIME and I hated it so much (especially compared to Visual Studio) that switched to notepad++ and running SBCL in my console. Eventually I lost interest in lisp, id like to get back to it, but SLIME has really left a bad impression on me.
  - informatimago 11y ago
    I won't argue, slime, like a lot of emacs tools, are not necessarily the right tool for everybody, at all stage. For very beginners, any editor they're familiar with will do (but if they're beginner, how would they be familiar with any editor? Just start with emacs, it's as simple as any other, click and point etc; you can try it anything you do with Notepad, do exactly the same with emacs and you will get the same results). And indeed, using a CL implementation in the terminal (but with rlwrap if you're use a read-line deficient implementation; clisp has it included), for your first steps can be a better learning experience than using sophisticated GUIs. Just like I wouldn't advise to use Xcode or Visual Studio to a beginner starting to learn C or C++: just edit your code with ed(1), and run { cc -o hw hw.c } in the terminal. Be sure to teach in advanced lessons about the ed(1) command: ! cc -o hw hw.c && ./hw RET like: $ ed hw.lisp hw.lisp: No such file or directory i (defun main () (princ "Hello World!") (terpri)) (main) . w 59 !clisp -norc -q hw.lisp Hello World! ! 1,$n 1 (defun main () 2 (princ "Hello World!") 3 (terpri)) 4 (main) q $ Somebody who lacks this experience, cannot understand the benefits of "IDE" or of emacs and slime. But also, the feature of calling out external programs like a compiler from an editor, exists in any good editor, not just emacs. Only it's emacs it's easier because you can customize it much more. It becomes clear when the newbie will have typed a hundred times: !clisp -l myprogram.lisp -x '(main)' RET Then you introduce him to emacs and slime and he will feel you're Jesus came back to save him.
    - pvaldes 11y ago
      > but with rlwrap if you're use a read-line deficient implementation; clisp has it included Big point. The raw sbcl repl really hurts unless you use a superior mode or at least rlwrap.
- rayiner 11y ago
  It is a significant barrier to entry for everyone else, no doubt. But what are you going to do? There isn't any money in commercial Lisp environments anymore, at least outside certain niches. And the people who like Lisp enough to write an IDE for it already know how to use Emacs. But you're not everyone else. Individually, it's worth learning for sure! I haven't encountered an environment quite as productive as SLIME/SBCL. I hear Clojure is all the rage these days and it has an IDE, but functional programming with immutable objects is a bit over my head.
  - Blackthorn 11y ago
    Other Lisps (Clojure) don't seem to have this problem, with a variety of great choices.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      Clojure can leverage an ecosystem that's mostly built by people who don't write in Clojure.
      - bsder 11y ago
        Um, exactly? I'm trying to figure out if that was a real complaint or a sarcastic comment.
        ikurei 11y ago
        I'd bet it was neither. It's something that clojure is doing right.
        S4M 11y ago
        Since Clojure runs on the JVM and has a good interoperability with Java, it's easier to write plugins to for developing in Clojure using IDEs written in Java (mainly) for Java, like Eclipse or IntelliJ.
    - lispm 11y ago
      There is little reason to use Eclipse or Intellij with Common Lisp. That's a non-starter. Editors like vim can be used with Common Lisp just fine. Most people I know just use Emacs/SLIME because it's reasonably advanced and can be used nicely via GUI or a terminal connection. Personally I use the LispWorks for editing code, mostly. It has a Emacs/Hemlock-like editor written in Common Lisp built-in. I also use the Clozure CL on the Mac, which also has a hemlock-derived editor built-in. Where Clojure naturally has better integration into the Java ecosystem (Java IDEs, too), Common Lisp has the better IDEs written in itself.
- deepaksurti 11y ago
  When I started learning CL, I tried Emacs for a week, but then gave up. I was a VIM user already. So this is my development environment and I have been using it ever since, professionally as well. I have one tab in terminal which has VIM, another tab that runs CL REPL (I mostly use LW Professional that allows building a non IDE image or SBCL). I start my REPL as such: rlwrap -D 2 -m " \ " sbcl OR rlwrap -D 2 -m " \ " lw-console Then I my REPL I can just press: [Ctrl + ^] and it opens a temporary VIM Buffer, so I can type away my Lisp expression and when I quit the buffer, the expression is available on the REPL prompt. I have the usual suspects: tagbar and exuberant ctags, to help. I don't use auto complete much (a quirk probably). But the fact that I can save my lisp image and come back later and start where I left is the big difference, which I can't do in Python or C++ (AFAIK). So a simple setup with Vim, rlwrap (with ability to open temp vim buffer) in a Lisp REPL is possible and also productive. Still Vim is another beast, so the rider here is one knows Vim, but may be another text editor should also work.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  Why? When someone learns Java they learn Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA. When someone learns C++ they learn Visual Studio or QtCreator/KDevelop/CodeBlocks... And so on.
  - vladharbuz 11y ago
    I don't think one can compare the difficulty of learning IntelliJ IDEA with the difficulty of learning Emacs. All of the editors you mentioned use a paradigm of text editing familiar to everyone who has used Notepad. When starting out with Emacs, you even need to learn how to quit it.
    - informatimago 11y ago
      You mean like, clicking on the File menu, and clicking on the Quit menu item? How alien!
      - pvdebbe 11y ago
        Closing windows using mouse? Sounds alien enough to me :)
    - aidenn0 11y ago
      By this argument, if I shipped a customized emacs with e.g. C-c for copy C-v for paste and C-q for quit, and slime and sbcl bundled inside, that would make slime as accessible as eclipse/intellij/visual studio? I'm willing to try it (really not that hard to do), but I bet good money that many people would still balk because it's spelled E-M-A-C-S.
      - klibertp 11y ago
        Pretty sure that's done already. I never needed this but one or more of these: http://ergoemacs.org/misc/list_of_emacs_starter_kits.html http://ergoemacs.org/misc/list_of_emacs_starter_kits.html should be pretty much exactly this: Emacs with C-c, C-v and other "modern" features. And you're right, these releases don't change much. Programmer's tools tend to be chosen based on fashion and fads, not on their merit.
- informatimago 11y ago
  It's also ridiculous for a computer user not to know emacs. What do they teach in kindergarden schools?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- richardjdare 11y ago
  It would be nice if there was something like DrRacket[1] for Common Lisp, or maybe something like Haskell for Mac[2] that was on HN yesterday[3]. You could package it with SBCL and a link to "Practical Common Lisp" and newcomers could be typing in code within 5 minutes. I like using Emacs myself, but a lot of people find it intimidating. I know coders who are smarter than me, (vim using C++ finance programmers even!) and I can't persuade them to try SBCL/SLIME. Emacsophobia may be irrational (I didn't find it hard to learn once I stopped expecting to use modern ui conventions) but asking people to face up to their misgivings about a product is a hard sell compared to offering something slick and attractive. [1] http://www.racket-lang.org/ http://www.racket-lang.org/ [2] http://haskellformac.com/ http://haskellformac.com/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10114767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10114767
  - lispm 11y ago
    You can download Clozure Common Lisp (CCL) from Apple's Macintosh Appstore. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clozure-cl/id489900618?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clozure-cl/id489900618?mt=12 It's also available from Clozure: http://ccl.clozure.com/download.html http://ccl.clozure.com/download.html A better environment and more expensive (though there is a limited personal edition) is LispWorks. http://www.lispworks.com/ http://www.lispworks.com/
    - agentultra 11y ago
      The Hemlock based editor is still heavily based off of Emacs.
      - lispm 11y ago
        That's totally great. Fits well into Mac OS X, which supports basic Emacs keybindings. It uses a window for each buffer.
        agentultra 11y ago
        And has some neat CCL-specific features like the process window, etc. I'm not knocking it. :) Still a bit of a shot from the "Haskell for Mac" type environment I'm interested in developing.
- pnathan 11y ago
  It absolutely is. I have spent some time hacking on the Eclipse Lisp plugin in an effort to remediate this, but I simply don't have the motivation anymore to do it for free - the code is in Java (and the codebase is in disrepair), the Eclipse plugin system is fragile, and I'd not really use the output (I use Emacs... a lot). If someone came to me and said that they'd like to use the tool, or offered to compensate me somehow, I'd go on and make it better.
doomrobo 11y ago
This is unreadable on mobile
- ParrotyError 11y ago
  It's unreadable on desktop too. What's with this new fashion?
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    An exercise in acceptance.
  - sethhochberg 11y ago
    I don't mind the visual style, but the author seems to have forgotten that some people use actual mice instead of inertial-scrolling trackpads.... using a scroll wheel goes nowhere fast on this kind of page.
    - cuddlybacon 11y ago
      Even with an inertial-scrolling trackpad it doesn't scroll well.
      - _delirium 11y ago
        Works fine for me in Firefox on OSX, scrolling with a macbook trackpad. Maybe it's using something that doesn't work well cross-platform?
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Here's a somehow readable version http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=homepage&url=http%3A%2F%2Feudoxia.me%2Farticle%2Fcommon-lisp-sotu-2015%2F http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=homepage&url=http...
- finnjohnsen2 11y ago
  Horisontal works for me on my nexus 6 phone
2400 11y ago
sorry, but it's impossible to read this site.
kazinator 11y ago
Before this page, I've never seen anything defeat the Print Edit add-on for Firefox --- the last resort for reading something. Wow! Can we have this in a nice, less ironic format, like, say: ((:domain "Web Development" (:subdomain "Back End" (:entry "Clack" ...) ...) (:subdomain "Front End" ...) ...) (:domain ...))
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Lisp is magic :). Apparently things related to it also get enchanted. EDIT: yes please for the easy format. Would gladly read it in Emacs, navigating it with Paredit :).
deltaprotocol 11y ago
Wow, yes, dark theme huge letters, so simple, so nice, how most people get it wrong? And then... white wall of light almost gets me blind.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
And here I thought I was up to date on gamedev-related libs in CL... Thanks for the list! At first look the list may look very opinionated ("use XYZ and just XYZ, forget about anything else"), but I understand the CL world has a bit of a discovery problem - it's often hard to tell e.g. which library is stable, and which is stabl-ish (e.g. made good enough for basic cases and then abandoned). Promoting top-of-the-line tools seems like something the community needs right now.
- WalterGR 11y ago
  Gamedev? Do you mean the Graphics section?
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Yes. I didn't know about CEPL and Varjo before.
- eudox 11y ago
  When writing things like this you have to tread a line between "I am somehow an expert on Everything, trust me" and "here's 200 different libraries, and sixty pages of reviews and benchmarks, it's your choice in the end". The latter is basically in the situation when you go to a Cliki page[0], or when someone on freenode/#lisp asks what library they can use for X, and was what I mainly wanted to avoid. [0] See http://www.cliki.net/xml http://www.cliki.net/xml for an illustration of choice paralysis
sevengraff 11y ago
I'd love to see this breakdown for more languages.
- cgag 11y ago
  Here's one for haskell: https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md
mark_l_watson 11y ago
That is a really good writeup - thanks. I started using Common Lisp in 1984 when Xerox rolled out CL as an update for my 1108 Lisp Machine. 31 years seems like a long time. The Common Lisp community is great and with Zach's contribution of Quicklisp, most of the hassles of setting up a good CL dev environment are solved. I especially liked seeing the two machine learning packages.
pvaldes 11y ago
"I’ve never done any graphics programming, so my knowledge of this area is lacking" cl-ply for example: draw and manage 3d polygon meshes.
WalterGR 11y ago
I see Postmodern and Elephant mentioned frequently around the web - but not in this list. Are they no good?
- zachbeane 11y ago
  Postmodern is good. It works only on Postgres. It is fast, easy, and stable. Elephant has been unmaintained for many years. I wouldn't recommend it.
- eudox 11y ago
  Postmodern is very good, it just slipped my mind as I haven't used it except as a reference when implementing my own ORM. But since Postmodern is Postgres-only, and is a very stable, maintained library (and I doubt the author has plans for the future, having mostly moved to JavaScript), it doesn't really fit into either 'future work' or 'consolidation'. As for Elephant, IIRC it's no longer maintained, and I think the model it presents -- just serialize CLOS objects, with whatever backend -- is the wrong way to go about it. Most of the time, it's better to be aware that you're using SQL, or a JSON file, or whatever your storage is.
ilurkedhere 11y ago
This is great. I've been out of the Common Lisp world for several years and stuff has really changed since. CL-STMX is awesome!
mindcrime 11y ago
I just started making a serious effort to learn CL (finally, after having it "on the list" for over a decade) a few nights ago. I'd already been an Emacs user, but not an Emacs "power user". Still, it took me 20 minutes or so to get Emacs, SBCL and Slime all setup. Once it was all working, I just had to spend a few minutes learning a few key combinations I'd not bothered much with before (like how to move between frames, and then the Slime specific ones for compiling and loading Lisp files), and I was off to the races. Now granted, I already knew my way around Emacs a little (emphasis on little), but I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get up and running with that environment. And now I have even more motivation to truly master Emacs. Personally, I'm pretty happy with the state of the Common Lisp Ecosystem, approaching it as Lisp beginner (but not a programming beginner). shrug
- aidenn0 11y ago
  Out of curiosity, how are you approaching learning it? Practical Common Lisp seems to be the most popular entry point for non-beginner programmers learning lisp.
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    Yeah, I decided to work my way through Practical Common Lisp. I haven't gotten very far yet, but I'm dividing my attention between that and a number of other things that I've been putting off for way too long. Like, as I sit here in front of the computer tonight before going to bed, I'm working through some of Learning R.
  - monkeyshelli 11y ago
    I started with Practical Common Lisp, but found out Lisp-koans (https://github.com/google/lisp-koans https://github.com/google/lisp-koans) support my flow of learning CL better, as I do some koans while commuting in the train :)
    - aidenn0 11y ago
      That's interesting; probably a learning-style difference, but the one time I tried a -koans (ruby-koans in this case), I found it to be a very inefficient way to learn.
VitoVan 11y ago
I'd like to translate and repost this article, but can't find a license. Can you grant me the permission?
_pmf_ 11y ago
That's a really great resource. With the usual CL directories, it's completely opaque which libraries are maintained and usable and which are out of data.
crististm 11y ago
"CLIM is interesting and was the last attempt to do any kind of research on how user interfaces should be built, but is not a viable option in 2015." -hmmm, what!? Am I the only one left who thinks that gui widgets without a context (think qt, gtk) lead to inconsistent and inferior interfaces? If anything, since it is the _last_ attempt at GUI research, then we should continue from there. Or not, if we think that the Unity/Metro are THE interfaces...
- aidenn0 11y ago
  No, but a working GUI is better than a non-working GUI.
pjmlp 11y ago
I didn't find any information about commercial Common Lisp offerings like LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp.
- mjn 11y ago
  Of the things discussed in this post, the main area where I would seriously suggest a commercial Common Lisp system even for a newcomer, is if they are interested in GUIs, either on the development or runtime side. I can recommend LispWorks for those: it has a graphical IDE with graphical debugger, and a very nice cross-platform GUI library with native look-and-feel (called CAPI). I think compared to the open-source options, both of those will result in a lot less pulling out of hair. CommonQt is passable, but CAPI is far less of a hassle, especially for cross-platform deployment. The obvious downside is that LispWorks costs money and is not open-source, so is probably most attractive to people developing a commercial product. Also, in the case of using CAPI, you commit to LispWorks as your implementation.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    The biggest issue I find, although I lack the experience to really validate it, is that those environments still provide an overall developer tooling experience that is way better than the open source offerings. An evolution of the Interlisp-D/Symbolics Genera systems.
deepaksurti 11y ago
For the GUI toolkits, don't know why CAPI was not listed? Yes it is LW specific but it is a worthy choice. I prototyped an entire 3D game scene using CAPI using the OpenGL 1 FFI they provided and it was very productive. Of course CEPL then would have made it more fun, though I don't know if CEPL works with LW CAPI.

199 points by dwc 11y ago

The fact that it’s built on Emacs is a problem, as telling a new user they have to learn Emacs before using SLIME (which is not strictly true) is a significant artificial barrier to entry. Yes, it is true. It's ridiculous to expect a person new to a language to also learn Emacs. It is absolutely a significant barrier to entry.

melling 11y ago
It takes 15 minutes to learn Emacs at a basic level.
- eudox 11y ago
  I think about three years went by between the first time I opened the Emacs tutorial and when I started using Emacs seriously. So, sure, the barrier to entry doesn't look so high once you're past it, but insurmountable before. Specially when the official tutorial tells new users to move around the file using obscure key combinations and even the standard copy/paste/kill key combinations don't work.
  - melling 11y ago
    The standard copy and paste work for me. Just use the arrow keys and page up/down keys to navigate. Skip the complicated stuff and pretend you're using Notepad.
    - WalterGR 11y ago
      Skip the complicated stuff and pretend you're using Notepad. No? Being a beginner to Lisp doesn't imply being a beginner to programming. Why would an experienced non-Lisp programmer find being subjected to a Notepad-like development experience worth even the slightest consideration? (EDIT: And non-experienced non-Lisp programmers also have a preferred tool-set, which is likely superior to Notepad.) Emacs can be great - to some people. The "You have to use Emacs to program in Lisp" meme is not great.
      - melling 11y ago
        So don't use it like Notepad. Give it the full hour. And I doubt if you have to use Emacs to write in Lisp. Let me Google it for you: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/94792/using-vim-for-lisp-development http://stackoverflow.com/questions/94792/using-vim-for-lisp-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19891
      - pvaldes 11y ago
        "you have to use Emacs to program in lisp..." You don't. Nobody stops you to use vim and fire a clisp repl instead if you want. Older but much friendly to start than sbcl. Emacs as a barrier to lisp is an interesting concept. To me was exactly the opposite.
        WalterGR 11y ago
        You don't. Nobody stops you to use vim and fire a clisp repl instead if you want. Of course. And there could very well be a service that accepts handwritten source code via the post, transcribes it, executes it, and mails you the output. In context, I'm responding to the following: • the article's preference for beginner-friendly suggestions (e.g. don't overwhelm beginners with an abundance of choice) • the specific text I quote in my original comment above, and • the fact that Emacs+SLIME is the de facto standard answer to every Lisp beginner who asks for an IDE.
        pvaldes 11y ago
        "Emacs+SLIME is the de facto standard answer to every Lisp beginner who asks for an IDE" Is a good advice because emacs is awesome, multipurpose, and free. But, you have choices. You could use also slimv, the "slime for vim" for example. And Vim is also awesome, multipurpose and free. If you are a total beginner that do not want to learn neither vim nor emacs (something that you will regret when you finally learn one of them some years later) just forget all about superior modes, fire a clisp repl in bash and use your favourite text editor to write and copy-paste. If you want a simple plan to start, is pretty simple If you want it more simple, just save some bucks and buy a commercial lisp, like allegro for example that comes with a nice IDE: allegro-composer. You obtain what you pay for.
    - masukomi 11y ago
      use what's possibly the world's most powerful editor... but pretend you're using notepad... ...
      - melling 11y ago
        Just to get started. Many people are intimidated by Emacs because there is so much to learn. If it scares you, start off simple then let your knowledge grow organically.
        fein 11y ago
        I've been coding in emacs for years and still have no idea what I'm doing. Lisp makes sense, but I'm aware that there are thousands of features in emacs that I'm unaware of. It makes life MUCH worse switching from linux to osx emacs and back though.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    > Specially when the official tutorial tells new users to move around the file using obscure key combinations If you're a Mac user, they're actually - in all likelihood - not that obscure; you can use the same exact key combinations in pretty much every OS X application. The built-in tutorial is indeed exceissively comprehensive, but those "obscure" keybindings are incredibly useful, particularly C-a and C-e (much faster than using "Home" or "End", respectively), which is why they're covered. And really, the Emacs bindings aren't any harder than the CUA bindings; they're just different, and can be easily gleaned (in graphical Emacs installations, at least) by poking around in the menu and looking at the shortcuts for certain commands, like opening/saving files or killing/yanking. > and even the standard copy/paste/kill key combinations don't work. This is easily fixable by going to Options -> Use CUA Keys, which enables C-x for kill, C-v for yank, and C-c for copy. OS X users can also just use Command-C/V/X like normal, with or without this option enabled.
    - vsync 11y ago
      > And really, the Emacs bindings aren't any harder than the CUA bindings; they're just different, and can be easily gleaned Not only that, they're older (i.e., Emacs was there first).
    - engi_nerd 11y ago
      > If you're a Mac user, they're actually - in all likelihood - not that obscure; you can use the same exact key combinations in pretty much every OS X application. Apple doesn't go out of their way to really point this out. Ordinary Mac users have no idea about this. None!
      - na85 11y ago
        That's because ordinary Mac users need to be spoonfed.
  - na85 11y ago
    It's easy to learn C-x C-s to save, C-x C-c to quit, C-x C-f to open a file. That's how I got by with emacs for about 6 months, just because I liked the tab/indent behaviour so much. Then after that it's easy to learn the C-x chords for splitting windows, and you're at about the level where I used emacs for about 5 years, with maybe some C-c C-c to compile things. Honestly emacs is not that hard and you can be pretty productive with just the bare minimum. I still don't use the arcane commands to move the cursor around. I don't even know what they are. I use the arrow keys and pgup/pgdown.
- jacobmoe 11y ago
  Basic editing does take 15 minutes. In 20 minutes you realize that Emacs out-of-the-box is embarrassingly bad relative to modern editors, and to justify using it you'll have to go deeper. A year later, you start to feel like a somewhat proficient user.
  - pvdebbe 11y ago
    What's a modern editor? Newest stable version of Emacs (24.5) is from April 2015, 4 months old. The fresh Emacs 25 is cooking.
    - jacobmoe 11y ago
      I'm an Emacs fanboy, and I'm already using 25. The fact is, if someone is just looking for a text editor and not a new hobby, I would recommend Atom. The editor that you have after using Emacs for 15 minutes is not very good. The editor you have after a year of dedicated use is amazing.
- maehwasu 11y ago
  OP is getting hate, but I write a lot of Clojure code in Emacs, and I find the following commands cover 97%+ of my usage, maybe more. For config I use Emacs Live out-of-the-box, and remap Command on OSX to be my Ctrl. That's it. C-a, C-e, C-b, C-f, C-p, C-n, C-v, M-v for line/screen maneuvering. C-o for Ace-jump to go to the start of any words I see on the page. C-d to delete. C-s to search for words not on the page. C-k, C-y, and also how to use them with paredit to yank whole s-expression chunks. Buffer switching and killing. File saving and opening. I teach the above to any friends who want to learn Emacs/Clojure/LISP, leaving out a few other features like whole word deletion and more advanced paredit. With halfway decent aptitude and a little practice, they become productive very quickly (within a few hours, which is a pretty good investment relative to "normal" text editors in my book). Also, you can use a lot of the commands for normal OSX text editing, which further improves the investment.
eudox 11y ago
I should have expanded on the 'not strictly true' bit: for a while I wrote code on Sublime Text and used the REPL from SLIME, with the windows side by side, as SublimeREPL was pretty terrible. And I was fairly productive, too. Eventually I just caved and learned Emacs.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
guiomie 11y ago
I tried learning lisp with SLIME and I hated it so much (especially compared to Visual Studio) that switched to notepad++ and running SBCL in my console. Eventually I lost interest in lisp, id like to get back to it, but SLIME has really left a bad impression on me.
- informatimago 11y ago
  I won't argue, slime, like a lot of emacs tools, are not necessarily the right tool for everybody, at all stage. For very beginners, any editor they're familiar with will do (but if they're beginner, how would they be familiar with any editor? Just start with emacs, it's as simple as any other, click and point etc; you can try it anything you do with Notepad, do exactly the same with emacs and you will get the same results). And indeed, using a CL implementation in the terminal (but with rlwrap if you're use a read-line deficient implementation; clisp has it included), for your first steps can be a better learning experience than using sophisticated GUIs. Just like I wouldn't advise to use Xcode or Visual Studio to a beginner starting to learn C or C++: just edit your code with ed(1), and run { cc -o hw hw.c } in the terminal. Be sure to teach in advanced lessons about the ed(1) command: ! cc -o hw hw.c && ./hw RET like: $ ed hw.lisp hw.lisp: No such file or directory i (defun main () (princ "Hello World!") (terpri)) (main) . w 59 !clisp -norc -q hw.lisp Hello World! ! 1,$n 1 (defun main () 2 (princ "Hello World!") 3 (terpri)) 4 (main) q $ Somebody who lacks this experience, cannot understand the benefits of "IDE" or of emacs and slime. But also, the feature of calling out external programs like a compiler from an editor, exists in any good editor, not just emacs. Only it's emacs it's easier because you can customize it much more. It becomes clear when the newbie will have typed a hundred times: !clisp -l myprogram.lisp -x '(main)' RET Then you introduce him to emacs and slime and he will feel you're Jesus came back to save him.
  - pvaldes 11y ago
    > but with rlwrap if you're use a read-line deficient implementation; clisp has it included Big point. The raw sbcl repl really hurts unless you use a superior mode or at least rlwrap.
rayiner 11y ago
It is a significant barrier to entry for everyone else, no doubt. But what are you going to do? There isn't any money in commercial Lisp environments anymore, at least outside certain niches. And the people who like Lisp enough to write an IDE for it already know how to use Emacs. But you're not everyone else. Individually, it's worth learning for sure! I haven't encountered an environment quite as productive as SLIME/SBCL. I hear Clojure is all the rage these days and it has an IDE, but functional programming with immutable objects is a bit over my head.
- Blackthorn 11y ago
  Other Lisps (Clojure) don't seem to have this problem, with a variety of great choices.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Clojure can leverage an ecosystem that's mostly built by people who don't write in Clojure.
    - bsder 11y ago
      Um, exactly? I'm trying to figure out if that was a real complaint or a sarcastic comment.
      - ikurei 11y ago
        I'd bet it was neither. It's something that clojure is doing right.
      - S4M 11y ago
        Since Clojure runs on the JVM and has a good interoperability with Java, it's easier to write plugins to for developing in Clojure using IDEs written in Java (mainly) for Java, like Eclipse or IntelliJ.
  - lispm 11y ago
    There is little reason to use Eclipse or Intellij with Common Lisp. That's a non-starter. Editors like vim can be used with Common Lisp just fine. Most people I know just use Emacs/SLIME because it's reasonably advanced and can be used nicely via GUI or a terminal connection. Personally I use the LispWorks for editing code, mostly. It has a Emacs/Hemlock-like editor written in Common Lisp built-in. I also use the Clozure CL on the Mac, which also has a hemlock-derived editor built-in. Where Clojure naturally has better integration into the Java ecosystem (Java IDEs, too), Common Lisp has the better IDEs written in itself.
deepaksurti 11y ago
When I started learning CL, I tried Emacs for a week, but then gave up. I was a VIM user already. So this is my development environment and I have been using it ever since, professionally as well. I have one tab in terminal which has VIM, another tab that runs CL REPL (I mostly use LW Professional that allows building a non IDE image or SBCL). I start my REPL as such: rlwrap -D 2 -m " \ " sbcl OR rlwrap -D 2 -m " \ " lw-console Then I my REPL I can just press: [Ctrl + ^] and it opens a temporary VIM Buffer, so I can type away my Lisp expression and when I quit the buffer, the expression is available on the REPL prompt. I have the usual suspects: tagbar and exuberant ctags, to help. I don't use auto complete much (a quirk probably). But the fact that I can save my lisp image and come back later and start where I left is the big difference, which I can't do in Python or C++ (AFAIK). So a simple setup with Vim, rlwrap (with ability to open temp vim buffer) in a Lisp REPL is possible and also productive. Still Vim is another beast, so the rider here is one knows Vim, but may be another text editor should also work.
Mikeb85 11y ago
Why? When someone learns Java they learn Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA. When someone learns C++ they learn Visual Studio or QtCreator/KDevelop/CodeBlocks... And so on.
- vladharbuz 11y ago
  I don't think one can compare the difficulty of learning IntelliJ IDEA with the difficulty of learning Emacs. All of the editors you mentioned use a paradigm of text editing familiar to everyone who has used Notepad. When starting out with Emacs, you even need to learn how to quit it.
  - informatimago 11y ago
    You mean like, clicking on the File menu, and clicking on the Quit menu item? How alien!
    - pvdebbe 11y ago
      Closing windows using mouse? Sounds alien enough to me :)
  - aidenn0 11y ago
    By this argument, if I shipped a customized emacs with e.g. C-c for copy C-v for paste and C-q for quit, and slime and sbcl bundled inside, that would make slime as accessible as eclipse/intellij/visual studio? I'm willing to try it (really not that hard to do), but I bet good money that many people would still balk because it's spelled E-M-A-C-S.
    - klibertp 11y ago
      Pretty sure that's done already. I never needed this but one or more of these: http://ergoemacs.org/misc/list_of_emacs_starter_kits.html http://ergoemacs.org/misc/list_of_emacs_starter_kits.html should be pretty much exactly this: Emacs with C-c, C-v and other "modern" features. And you're right, these releases don't change much. Programmer's tools tend to be chosen based on fashion and fads, not on their merit.
informatimago 11y ago
It's also ridiculous for a computer user not to know emacs. What do they teach in kindergarden schools?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
richardjdare 11y ago
It would be nice if there was something like DrRacket[1] for Common Lisp, or maybe something like Haskell for Mac[2] that was on HN yesterday[3]. You could package it with SBCL and a link to "Practical Common Lisp" and newcomers could be typing in code within 5 minutes. I like using Emacs myself, but a lot of people find it intimidating. I know coders who are smarter than me, (vim using C++ finance programmers even!) and I can't persuade them to try SBCL/SLIME. Emacsophobia may be irrational (I didn't find it hard to learn once I stopped expecting to use modern ui conventions) but asking people to face up to their misgivings about a product is a hard sell compared to offering something slick and attractive. [1] http://www.racket-lang.org/ http://www.racket-lang.org/ [2] http://haskellformac.com/ http://haskellformac.com/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10114767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10114767
- lispm 11y ago
  You can download Clozure Common Lisp (CCL) from Apple's Macintosh Appstore. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clozure-cl/id489900618?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clozure-cl/id489900618?mt=12 It's also available from Clozure: http://ccl.clozure.com/download.html http://ccl.clozure.com/download.html A better environment and more expensive (though there is a limited personal edition) is LispWorks. http://www.lispworks.com/ http://www.lispworks.com/
  - agentultra 11y ago
    The Hemlock based editor is still heavily based off of Emacs.
    - lispm 11y ago
      That's totally great. Fits well into Mac OS X, which supports basic Emacs keybindings. It uses a window for each buffer.
      - agentultra 11y ago
        And has some neat CCL-specific features like the process window, etc. I'm not knocking it. :) Still a bit of a shot from the "Haskell for Mac" type environment I'm interested in developing.
pnathan 11y ago
It absolutely is. I have spent some time hacking on the Eclipse Lisp plugin in an effort to remediate this, but I simply don't have the motivation anymore to do it for free - the code is in Java (and the codebase is in disrepair), the Eclipse plugin system is fragile, and I'd not really use the output (I use Emacs... a lot). If someone came to me and said that they'd like to use the tool, or offered to compensate me somehow, I'd go on and make it better.

doomrobo 11y ago

This is unreadable on mobile

ParrotyError 11y ago
It's unreadable on desktop too. What's with this new fashion?
- agumonkey 11y ago
  An exercise in acceptance.
- sethhochberg 11y ago
  I don't mind the visual style, but the author seems to have forgotten that some people use actual mice instead of inertial-scrolling trackpads.... using a scroll wheel goes nowhere fast on this kind of page.
  - cuddlybacon 11y ago
    Even with an inertial-scrolling trackpad it doesn't scroll well.
    - _delirium 11y ago
      Works fine for me in Firefox on OSX, scrolling with a macbook trackpad. Maybe it's using something that doesn't work well cross-platform?
agumonkey 11y ago
Here's a somehow readable version http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=homepage&url=http%3A%2F%2Feudoxia.me%2Farticle%2Fcommon-lisp-sotu-2015%2F http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=homepage&url=http...
finnjohnsen2 11y ago
Horisontal works for me on my nexus 6 phone

2400 11y ago

sorry, but it's impossible to read this site.

kazinator 11y ago

Before this page, I've never seen anything defeat the Print Edit add-on for Firefox --- the last resort for reading something. Wow! Can we have this in a nice, less ironic format, like, say: ((:domain "Web Development" (:subdomain "Back End" (:entry "Clack" ...) ...) (:subdomain "Front End" ...) ...) (:domain ...))

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Lisp is magic :). Apparently things related to it also get enchanted. EDIT: yes please for the easy format. Would gladly read it in Emacs, navigating it with Paredit :).

deltaprotocol 11y ago

Wow, yes, dark theme huge letters, so simple, so nice, how most people get it wrong? And then... white wall of light almost gets me blind.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

And here I thought I was up to date on gamedev-related libs in CL... Thanks for the list! At first look the list may look very opinionated ("use XYZ and just XYZ, forget about anything else"), but I understand the CL world has a bit of a discovery problem - it's often hard to tell e.g. which library is stable, and which is stabl-ish (e.g. made good enough for basic cases and then abandoned). Promoting top-of-the-line tools seems like something the community needs right now.

WalterGR 11y ago
Gamedev? Do you mean the Graphics section?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Yes. I didn't know about CEPL and Varjo before.
eudox 11y ago
When writing things like this you have to tread a line between "I am somehow an expert on Everything, trust me" and "here's 200 different libraries, and sixty pages of reviews and benchmarks, it's your choice in the end". The latter is basically in the situation when you go to a Cliki page[0], or when someone on freenode/#lisp asks what library they can use for X, and was what I mainly wanted to avoid. [0] See http://www.cliki.net/xml http://www.cliki.net/xml for an illustration of choice paralysis

sevengraff 11y ago

I'd love to see this breakdown for more languages.

cgag 11y ago
Here's one for haskell: https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md

mark_l_watson 11y ago

That is a really good writeup - thanks. I started using Common Lisp in 1984 when Xerox rolled out CL as an update for my 1108 Lisp Machine. 31 years seems like a long time. The Common Lisp community is great and with Zach's contribution of Quicklisp, most of the hassles of setting up a good CL dev environment are solved. I especially liked seeing the two machine learning packages.

pvaldes 11y ago

"I’ve never done any graphics programming, so my knowledge of this area is lacking" cl-ply for example: draw and manage 3d polygon meshes.

WalterGR 11y ago

I see Postmodern and Elephant mentioned frequently around the web - but not in this list. Are they no good?

zachbeane 11y ago
Postmodern is good. It works only on Postgres. It is fast, easy, and stable. Elephant has been unmaintained for many years. I wouldn't recommend it.
eudox 11y ago
Postmodern is very good, it just slipped my mind as I haven't used it except as a reference when implementing my own ORM. But since Postmodern is Postgres-only, and is a very stable, maintained library (and I doubt the author has plans for the future, having mostly moved to JavaScript), it doesn't really fit into either 'future work' or 'consolidation'. As for Elephant, IIRC it's no longer maintained, and I think the model it presents -- just serialize CLOS objects, with whatever backend -- is the wrong way to go about it. Most of the time, it's better to be aware that you're using SQL, or a JSON file, or whatever your storage is.

ilurkedhere 11y ago

This is great. I've been out of the Common Lisp world for several years and stuff has really changed since. CL-STMX is awesome!

mindcrime 11y ago

I just started making a serious effort to learn CL (finally, after having it "on the list" for over a decade) a few nights ago. I'd already been an Emacs user, but not an Emacs "power user". Still, it took me 20 minutes or so to get Emacs, SBCL and Slime all setup. Once it was all working, I just had to spend a few minutes learning a few key combinations I'd not bothered much with before (like how to move between frames, and then the Slime specific ones for compiling and loading Lisp files), and I was off to the races. Now granted, I already knew my way around Emacs a little (emphasis on little), but I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get up and running with that environment. And now I have even more motivation to truly master Emacs. Personally, I'm pretty happy with the state of the Common Lisp Ecosystem, approaching it as Lisp beginner (but not a programming beginner). shrug

aidenn0 11y ago
Out of curiosity, how are you approaching learning it? Practical Common Lisp seems to be the most popular entry point for non-beginner programmers learning lisp.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  Yeah, I decided to work my way through Practical Common Lisp. I haven't gotten very far yet, but I'm dividing my attention between that and a number of other things that I've been putting off for way too long. Like, as I sit here in front of the computer tonight before going to bed, I'm working through some of Learning R.
- monkeyshelli 11y ago
  I started with Practical Common Lisp, but found out Lisp-koans (https://github.com/google/lisp-koans https://github.com/google/lisp-koans) support my flow of learning CL better, as I do some koans while commuting in the train :)
  - aidenn0 11y ago
    That's interesting; probably a learning-style difference, but the one time I tried a -koans (ruby-koans in this case), I found it to be a very inefficient way to learn.

VitoVan 11y ago

I'd like to translate and repost this article, but can't find a license. Can you grant me the permission?

_pmf_ 11y ago

That's a really great resource. With the usual CL directories, it's completely opaque which libraries are maintained and usable and which are out of data.

crististm 11y ago

"CLIM is interesting and was the last attempt to do any kind of research on how user interfaces should be built, but is not a viable option in 2015." -hmmm, what!? Am I the only one left who thinks that gui widgets without a context (think qt, gtk) lead to inconsistent and inferior interfaces? If anything, since it is the _last_ attempt at GUI research, then we should continue from there. Or not, if we think that the Unity/Metro are THE interfaces...

aidenn0 11y ago
No, but a working GUI is better than a non-working GUI.

pjmlp 11y ago

I didn't find any information about commercial Common Lisp offerings like LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp.

mjn 11y ago
Of the things discussed in this post, the main area where I would seriously suggest a commercial Common Lisp system even for a newcomer, is if they are interested in GUIs, either on the development or runtime side. I can recommend LispWorks for those: it has a graphical IDE with graphical debugger, and a very nice cross-platform GUI library with native look-and-feel (called CAPI). I think compared to the open-source options, both of those will result in a lot less pulling out of hair. CommonQt is passable, but CAPI is far less of a hassle, especially for cross-platform deployment. The obvious downside is that LispWorks costs money and is not open-source, so is probably most attractive to people developing a commercial product. Also, in the case of using CAPI, you commit to LispWorks as your implementation.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  The biggest issue I find, although I lack the experience to really validate it, is that those environments still provide an overall developer tooling experience that is way better than the open source offerings. An evolution of the Interlisp-D/Symbolics Genera systems.

deepaksurti 11y ago

For the GUI toolkits, don't know why CAPI was not listed? Yes it is LW specific but it is a worthy choice. I prototyped an entire 3D game scene using CAPI using the OpenGL 1 FFI they provided and it was very productive. Of course CEPL then would have made it more fun, though I don't know if CEPL works with LW CAPI.