Hey, I made this! Feel free to ask anything.

I released this in 2016. It was a significant undertaking and I burned out pretty hard afterwards. I was operating under a naive "if you build it, they will come" model whereby building a modern-looking website, the community would coalesce around it and contribute to the wiki etc. But my "rallying people behind a cause" skills were insufficient.

One nice contribution: at the time Common Lisp didn't really have an official logo, which I felt was bad for marketing. So my friend made one: https://github.com/LispLang/lisplang.github.io/blob/master/a...

This was decidedly a social rather than technical effort, and social problems are hard to solve.

This looks like a rewrite of this web site? I don’t remember it looking so visually appealing.

I would hope that every programmer has a “happy language” that they most enjoy using. CL is my happy language, both for personal projects and also since around 1982 I have probably been paid to use Common Lisp for about five of the last 39 years.

This may sound sacrilegious, but in modern times I steer people newly interested in Lisp languages towards Racket. There are also many great Scheme implementations.

For my own development I use LispWorks Pro, which is pricey but extremely well supported. SBCL is probably the best open source CL system, and I often use it side by side with LispWorks.

This website (and all the author's libraries) was such a refresher. It has been important for me to not run away from CL (again). At that time, the "official" website, the first Google result for CL looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20160305135106/https://common-li... Fortunately, they revamped it circa 2018: https://common-lisp.net/ (work mainly due to @mmontone if I'm not mistaken). Since then, the Cookbook was expanded with useful content (it was kind of hard to find up to date information online, on even simple matters like how to build a binary) and we got some useful lists too, like https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl and a list of (current, existing) companies: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ Hopefully it's easier than ever to have your questions answered and start hacking in Lisp!

Another very helpful resource by Fernando was his state of CL ecosystem: https://borretti.me/article/common-lisp-sotu-2015 It really helped have an overview of the ecosystem, pick libraries and work on consolidation. I compiled one for 2020 here: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/state-of-the-common-lisp...

(ps: yes people, you can avoid Emacs and use VSCode to have a good experience! and even Atom, Jupyter notebooks and more. See https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...)

I've been curious about Common Lisp in the past but never really got started because I can't seem to find very good documentation. What do veteran CL users use as a reference? This maybe? http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index...

I suppose I've "become accustomed to a certain lifestyle" coming from Racket's excellent documentation. But even if you ignore Racket, the R6RS reference (for example) seems way more readable than the CL spec: https://docs.racket-lang.org/r6rs/r6rs-std/index.html Same goes for Clojure, which I've never used: https://clojure.org/reference/documentation

This is not meant to be an attack on Common Lisp; I'm just trying to learn.

EDIT: I just saw https://lisp-lang.org/spec/ which says "We're currently working on parsing the TeX sources of the specification to generate a more modern version of the CLHS. This might take a while." I'm looking forward to seeing the result!

I feel inspired to start with Lisp after being disappointed with the "open" source scene of 2021. I'd rather pay LispWorks a yearly fee and be left alone than dealing with unbalanced people in the Python space. The free Lisp implementations also look somewhat isolated from the ideological wars.

However, a C interface is required. Is this one the recommended solution? Is it really portable?

https://common-lisp.net/project/cffi/

What is the speed compared to a Python C extension? Are implementation-specific C interfaces faster (I guess they are)?

Sorry for so many questions, but these can usually only be answered by people who have actually used the interface.

That's my personal opinion, but I think that programming language pages should have more information density. I also think that using your average "startup template" for Common Lisp is a bit weird. A good example of what I like might be the OCaml homepage https://lisp-lang.org/, the Go homepage https://golang.org/. The Haskell homepage has a REPL with a tutorial, which encourages you to play around with the language, I think that's a good idea https://www.haskell.org/. TypeScript's page is also nice https://www.typescriptlang.org/. For something a little bit different, Dhall is also good at quickly demonstrating how it works https://dhall-lang.org/.

That might just be a consequence of my time on Hacker News, but I think the insistance on Paul Graham is a bit much.

The chart about server performance felt a bit weird to me, as I think the difference between Ruby and JS would be bigger at least. So I checked on techempower benchmarks (https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/) and sadly there is no common lisp. It's also not on the last runs (https://tfb-status.techempower.com/). I think putting the origin of the results and a way to reproduce them would be a good thing. I don't doubt that common lisp is fast, but that diagram looks a bit too much like hollow marketing, especially with the image behind.

The page about OO (https://lisp-lang.org/learn/clos) has a good explanation of multiple dispatch, but I think it should come with an example. The first steps pages (https://lisp-lang.org/learn/first-steps) also explains atoms well, but it doesn't explain lists after mentionning them.

In general this feels a bit unpolished, though some part are good. There's no mention of the Common Lisp cookbook (https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/), which sadly confirms a bit the "Lisp users all have NIH syndrome" meme.

Common lisp is cool but I really wish it wouldn't be an ANSI standard so the language development would continue.

The current standard library is a bit limiting and there are a bunch of good ideas that it could borrow from Clojure (literals? Anyone?)

Compare SxQL to Ecto.Query, the main query DSL for Elixir:

  query = from u in "users",
          where: u.age > 18,
          select: u.name

I enjoyed, now it is time to get some books. Wished Scheme did the same.

I wish LISP 2 was never abandoned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LISP_2

Why do we see programming language webpages and Wikipedia pages submission from time to time?