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Out of the 3, which one did you stick with? Racket? Could you give a quick overview of the reasoning behind your final decision?
by dorfsmay 6y ago
Out of the 3, which one did you stick with? Racket?
Could you give a quick overview of the reasoning behind your final decision?
- mark_l_watson 6y agoLispWorks Common Lisp. I have always liked Common Lisp better. LispWorks costs $3400 and Racket is obviously free. I usually recommend Racket when someone, at least right now, wants to learn Lisp. Racket is an effective gateway drug to the Lisp world :-)
- behnamoh 6y agoI've always wondered what LispWorks offers that costs so much. Is it the libraries, better IDE, or something else? Looking at Racket's documentation, it seems pretty "complete" with regard to things it covers (for free).
- mark_l_watson 6y agoThe cross platform CAPI UI library is good, as are the bundled dev tools. The will give you an evaluation license to try it.
- pjmlp 6y agoLispWorks and Allegro are the survivors from the Lisp Machine days. They offer the full development experience as having your own Lisp Machine, with optimizing compilers, IDE, frameworks, debugging tools.
- bjoli 6y agoI can't reply for Mark, but the commercial lisps have a development experience that is hard to match. When using CLOS you get an extra smalltalky experience which the other CL implementations lack. And the debuggers are superior in just about every way. Racket is nice and all that, but the commercial CLs are just that: commercial, aimed at people writing large programs with very high demands. Anecdote: I once hit a weird bug when trying to get a very old CL program running. Nothing big, but once in a blue moon I would get the wrong result. I spent 3 days banging my head angainst it, trying to find a way to trigger it reliably. I inspected the live environment, did print-debigging. A friend encountered the same bug when running the program in Allegro CL and managed to debug it within minutes.