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Reading PG's ANSI Common Lisp was a pivotal event on my career as a programmer. I wrote a high-resolution star map generation tool in CL about 14 years ago, and

by juanre 7y ago

Reading PG's ANSI Common Lisp was a pivotal event on my career as a programmer. I wrote a high-resolution star map generation tool in CL about 14 years ago, and have been working on it and selling the maps it produces for many years. Now I am moving away from the things I don't do well (ranking in Google and promoting) to what I think I do best (making beautiful maps) with this new site, where I open the engine to people who want to add custom star maps to their own products.

dig1 7y ago
The site and overall feeling looks clean, focused and built with a lot of love and passion. Kudos! I'd be happy to see more products like this, instead of frequent mishmash where visitor has no idea what it is looking at. Are you able to sustain yourself with this app and selling maps?
- juanre 7y ago
  Thanks! Yes, I do make a living. My other site, https://greaterskies.com/ https://greaterskies.com/, supports my family and two employees.
  - sjamaan 7y ago
    This is awesomely inspiring. Such a simple yet cool idea!
vallode 7y ago
I was slightly confused at first due to the simplified map svgs on the right hand side thinking: "is this all that it generates?" Looking at your gallery had me very impressed, this is a very cool project and I hope that you get many more people taking a look at it :)
- juanre 7y ago
  Thank you :-) I should probably feature the samples more clearly.
nnq 7y ago
> PG's ANSI Common Lisp Would you say PG's ANSI Common Lisp is better or worse (as a zero-to-hero intro to CL for an "experienced" programmer in other languages) than Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp? I'm curious because I'm currently teaching myself CL (slowly, as a leisurely hobby), mainly because I realized that I need a hyper-flexible un-opinionated language in my toolkit for some types of experiments I want to try on and CL seems to fit the job. But I found the "practical" part missing from Practical Common Lisp with the non-plausible problems/examples and also missing stuff about packaging/ecosystem and little on modern concurrency patterns...
- UYChuH 7y ago
  PG's ANSI common lisp was one of the first books I learned to program from. I still prefer it over Practical Common Lisp, partly because I appreciated the greater depth (I felt) it covered the basics in, and in that it was slightly more abstract... But mostly because Appendix D gives a really succinct description of the language, key functions, all the different parameters to FORMAT and LOOP, and all the different read macros. Never underestimate the value of a good appendix!
- juanre 7y ago
  I learned with ANSI CL, then read PG's On Lisp (which I downloaded from somewhere and printed, I don't think it was available). ANSI CL is great, the chapter where he writes an OO framework is just amazing. And On Lisp blew my mind. Seibel's Practical Common Lisp is a good book, worth reading, but quite lacking in the "practical" aspect, which tends to be implementation-dependent.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- snazz 7y ago
  Packaging and ecosystem has changed a lot recently, so On Lisp or ANSI Common Lisp would both be outdated quickly (as would Seibel’s PCL; PG does not have a book with that title). Most of that you can find online: practically everything is available through Quicklisp and it’s a very intuitive piece of software. Concurrency is harder and Bordeaux Threads might be too new for detailed inclusion in On Lisp or PCL. I would highly recommend On Lisp once you have gotten the syntax down. I ordered a printed copy of the PDF (legal since PG released it) and have been working through it. On Lisp won’t show you things that are easily done in other languages; its goal is to teach the power of CL. Certainly by the time you’re done you’d be comfortable with many types of macros, closures, the REPL-based workflow, and other strengths if CL, able to find more about how one uses it in practice without much trouble.

by juanre 7y ago

dig1 7y ago

The site and overall feeling looks clean, focused and built with a lot of love and passion. Kudos! I'd be happy to see more products like this, instead of frequent mishmash where visitor has no idea what it is looking at. Are you able to sustain yourself with this app and selling maps?

juanre 7y ago
Thanks! Yes, I do make a living. My other site, https://greaterskies.com/ https://greaterskies.com/, supports my family and two employees.
- sjamaan 7y ago
  This is awesomely inspiring. Such a simple yet cool idea!

vallode 7y ago

I was slightly confused at first due to the simplified map svgs on the right hand side thinking: "is this all that it generates?" Looking at your gallery had me very impressed, this is a very cool project and I hope that you get many more people taking a look at it :)

juanre 7y ago
Thank you :-) I should probably feature the samples more clearly.

nnq 7y ago

> PG's ANSI Common Lisp Would you say PG's ANSI Common Lisp is better or worse (as a zero-to-hero intro to CL for an "experienced" programmer in other languages) than Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp? I'm curious because I'm currently teaching myself CL (slowly, as a leisurely hobby), mainly because I realized that I need a hyper-flexible un-opinionated language in my toolkit for some types of experiments I want to try on and CL seems to fit the job. But I found the "practical" part missing from Practical Common Lisp with the non-plausible problems/examples and also missing stuff about packaging/ecosystem and little on modern concurrency patterns...

UYChuH 7y ago
PG's ANSI common lisp was one of the first books I learned to program from. I still prefer it over Practical Common Lisp, partly because I appreciated the greater depth (I felt) it covered the basics in, and in that it was slightly more abstract... But mostly because Appendix D gives a really succinct description of the language, key functions, all the different parameters to FORMAT and LOOP, and all the different read macros. Never underestimate the value of a good appendix!
juanre 7y ago
I learned with ANSI CL, then read PG's On Lisp (which I downloaded from somewhere and printed, I don't think it was available). ANSI CL is great, the chapter where he writes an OO framework is just amazing. And On Lisp blew my mind. Seibel's Practical Common Lisp is a good book, worth reading, but quite lacking in the "practical" aspect, which tends to be implementation-dependent.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
snazz 7y ago
Packaging and ecosystem has changed a lot recently, so On Lisp or ANSI Common Lisp would both be outdated quickly (as would Seibel’s PCL; PG does not have a book with that title). Most of that you can find online: practically everything is available through Quicklisp and it’s a very intuitive piece of software. Concurrency is harder and Bordeaux Threads might be too new for detailed inclusion in On Lisp or PCL. I would highly recommend On Lisp once you have gotten the syntax down. I ordered a printed copy of the PDF (legal since PG released it) and have been working through it. On Lisp won’t show you things that are easily done in other languages; its goal is to teach the power of CL. Certainly by the time you’re done you’d be comfortable with many types of macros, closures, the REPL-based workflow, and other strengths if CL, able to find more about how one uses it in practice without much trouble.