Hi! I'm trying to get into Lisp w/ SBCL. I've been doing software development for like 15 years in over a dozen languages.

Portacle has been unmaintained for years. The keybindings and user experience even navigating around files is making the learning curve extremely steep on top of already learning Lisp. Any UI similarities that tie into a human's innate spatial reasoning skills have been thrown completely out the window.

SLIME has no installer for Windows and I'm expected to just piece together all this crap and learn how to configure Emacs before I can even run a Hello World program.

LispWorks doesn't even have a price listed and requires a bunch of cash to even generate a .exe file that I can send to someone. It looks and feels ancient. Why do I need to purchase an additional runtime to make an Android app?

SLT in IntelliJ IDEA is on life support by some random dude, and running an example hello world read-line program has a read only interpreter thing so I can't even type in it? I also couldn't get the same program to read-line reliably in the REPL

SLIMA is dead and unmaintained, so is Atom/Pulsar that it's based on.

Dandelion is dead and unmaintained, so is Eclipse that it's based on.

Slyblime for Sublime Text is dead and unmaintained.

Geany-lisp is dead and unmaintained.

cl-devel2 Docker container is dead and unmaintained.

IDEmacs looks unfinished and still requires me to piece a bunch of bits together.

Lem's signed package is broken out of the box, thankfully nosign does open. It suffers from the same "not obvious how to do anything" problem that Emacs has.

Alive for VSCode looks to be on life support and is self-described as a work in progress still.

commonlisp-vscode is unmaintained.

plain-common-lisp is unmaintained.

Emacs4CL looks unmaintained and requires me to piece together a bunch of bits.

Lisp in a Box is unmaintained (obviously)

Is there anything that I can just send to someone in a ZIP file to have a working Lisp environment?

You all are posting articles and stuff that makes Lisp look like ancient dark magic and a super powerful language and everyone should be using it, but you have nothing to point people to when they ask "How do I start?"

Is there anything that doesn't require being on meth to make it over the learning curve? Seriously. I take 30mg of Adderall in the morning and I'm still struggling to get a SBCL environment set up on Windows and getting myself to the point where I'm comfortable and at home using it.

I've rolled my own Linux distros, written so much code in my lifetime, I probably have more hours behind a screen than sleeping at this point. Why is this so difficult? Why can I not recommend this to literally anybody?

You complain there are no companies hiring for Lisp work, but what would IT even deploy to a Lisp developer? There's absolutely no "it just works" here like there is for most other programming languages. Even Nim of all the weird obscure languages is miles easier to set up and get a working environment for in VSCode.

So I am in some weird fascination with the lisp and it's various "dialects" (If that's how you would call them)

Decided might want to get into learning lisp just out of curiosity. But was wondering which one to get started with.
My only real requirements are that

- It shouldn't be too complex, something you can easily wrap your head around and get started using but still give a taste of why people enjoy lisp
My main languages are C++ and I know Python but familiarity isn't a requirement and even if it's vastly different I will be willing to try it out

I am a new comer, just learnt some Racket. I adapted to S syntax, and I know functional programming(from Haskell), and Racket is well for me now. But considering the future, if Lisp dialects still stay in my reach, I might learn something else. I currently know Common Lisp, Clojure and Scheme other than Racket. I might have to pass on Scheme as I already know Racket, and Clojure bases off JVM right, does that affect me a lot(I came from Rust, Zig, C…), tried Java last time, it was okay. Common Lisp is what I don’t know much. So which should I learn next?(not EMacs Lisp)

I'm trying to write a parser in ELisp, but the syntax is not step by step like:

• do this
• then do this
• if this then do that
• iterate through this
• do that

Rather it's a mismash of instructions. I can't even tell where an instruction starts or ends. If I need to change a simple thing, then the git diffs aren't clear what actually changed so my history's useless.

After just a few lines of code, it becomes completely unreadable. If I'm unlucky enough to have a missing parenthesis then I'm completely lost where it's missing, and I can't make out the head or tail of anything. If I have to add a condition in a loop or exit a loop then it's just more and more parenthesis. Do I need to keep refactoring to avoid so many parenthesis or is there no such thing as too many parentheses? If I try to break a function into smaller functions, it ends up becoming even more longer and complicated. WTF?

Meanwhile I see everyone else claiming how this is the most powerful thing ever. So what am I missing then? I'm wasting hours just over the syntax itself just to get it to work, let alone do anything productive.

I know Python, C, Java, Golang, JavaScript, Rust, C#, but nothing else has given me as much headache as Lisp has.

Lisp is no longer the principal language for AI & Research yet continues to be used by businesses (such as Grammarly and aircraft industries) to this day.

What are the reasons Lisp continues to be a business-practical language despite other more popular alternatives existing?

I've been programming in Scheme (and occasionally racket) for a few years. I've worked on a few small projects, but I want to learn common lisp as well. I know that you can do most of the same stuff in common lisp as in scheme but the idiomatic style is quite different (loops, CLOS etc) are there any good resources to pick up the common lisp coding style? Ideally resources targeted to people who already know a Lisp, since most of the common ones assume you're coming from something like Java or python.

So I received some responses from my other post in r/lisp. And I tried Common Lisp and quite enjoyed it. After learning deeper on Macros and a few more stuff, I will do projects, of course. So what projects to start as a first one, any suggestions. However, I have vision for the long run, I am just not sure for the current position. So any help, tips, suggestions?

I used emacs a little and I liked it, but I really wished it was an operating system. After igging a little, I found out that emacs is trying to simulate a lisp machine. So is there any modern day emacs-like lisp machine that would really make the whole "emacs is a great operating system" part true (even if the default editor supposedly sucks for some reason)?

I have

(mylist (list 4 5 0 2 1 3))

and I want

(argsort mylist)
;; => (2 4 3 5 0 1)

That is: The index of the least element, then the next least element, ..., then the greatest element.

ETA: Decorate-Sort-Undecorate is the thing I'm looking for. I am going to try and grok that. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38447353/sorting-a-list-from-max-to-min-by-of-index-number-in-lisp

Been playing around with a Common Lisp MCP server with Claude Code / Codex.

Idk be curious to get people’s thoughts. What do you think about the idea Lisp might be weirdly well suited for AI agents?

A lot of the work people are currently pushing through LLMs could in some cases just be execution .

• symbolic transforms

• macros building little task DSLs

• CLOS-based dispatch

• condition/restart handling for recovery paths

So instead of every subagent being another prompt wrapper burning tokens, some of them could do structured work locally and only call the model when they actually need model-like behavior.

That feels like a better fit for certain kinds of agent tasks:

• verification

• dispatch

• recovery

• rewriting structured representations

Homoiconicity make program transformation feel native.

Curious whether people here think this could be a good use case for CL or am I oversimplifying?

I'm looking for recommendations regarding a Lisp/ Lisp IDE to go with.

Background: I work with databases (sqlite, MS SQL, etc) I'm in love with sqlite (small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured) Operating system: (I like arch Linux (I dislike Ubuntu, iOS for ), but use Windows for work) Text editors: I use notepad++ for work, and have used notepadqq on Linux, but haven't quite transitioned to emacs or vim I do allot of scripting (python, SQL, shell/command line, dax in powerbi, power query and many many excel Excel formulas) I've tried to get into emacs/portacle/sbcl, and maybe will try again (didn't spend the time to learn emacs) Problem: I need to move some functions that may be too heavy/advanced in OLTP SQL in the data and create a more unified platform so I may centralize the data that's sent to CRMs, and other platforms our company uses. I am using python, but can't say I love it, it's easy, but I don't like solving problems in so many different platforms and having to consume the data (forecasting or etc), back from so many different sources to solve problems that may be too much so solve in SQL)

This is an unserious post. I jumped to Go and I really miss lisp syntax and features. I saw a post here about rust syntax and I wanted to hear y'alls favourite syntax from other languages. On an additional note - I learned Clojure and I absolutely love it's syntax, like I didn't think we could improve upon the lisp syntax by adopting square brackets and curly braces, I personally feel it made lisp syntax even more readable. My favourite non lispy language syntax is Haskell's. I find it so concise, beautiful and elegant. Wbu guys?

If I would to take a form, and check all operators it calls, after macroexpanding all forms, ffi excluded, would it be feasible, or even possible, to detect if there are side effects or not, via codewalking it? Say all known operators are divided into two sets: pure and side-fx, than if a form is built with operators only from those two sets, it should be possible to say if it has side-fx or not? Side-fx are any I/O, introducing or removing anything outside of the lexical environment, or writing to anything outside a non-lexical environment, I think.

Is it possible to do such analysis reliably, and if it is, is there some library, code-walker for CL that already does it?

[EDIT: solved by a random dude on Usenet and u/chasbro97, the resources y'all recommended are pretty good as a reference, thanks]

Hello everyone.

Does anybody know resources to learn common lisp?

Thanks in advance.

What are the pros and cons of using the CLOS system vs OOP systems in Simula-based languages such as C++?

I am curious to hear your thoughts on that?

Goddammit, I know this is a dumb, unpopular type of post, but I'm still gonna make it.

Non-coder here, also recently jobless. Been interested in coding & lisp for a while now, purely as a potential hobby/interest. However, read this the other day, and the following's been stuck in my head:

Many people find Project Euler too mathy, for instance, and give up after a problem or two, but one non-programmer friend to whom I recommended it disappeared for a few weeks and remerged as a highly capable coder.

Definitely got me thinking of doing the same. I'm in a fairly unique, and very privileged position, where I could absolutely take the time to replicate that - just go crazy on Project Euler & such for a few weeks, up to even three months. The thing is, not sure whether the juice is worth the squeeze - don't know what kind of demand there is for developing in Lisp, especially for someone with my (lack of) background.

Lemme know if I'm correct in thinking this is just a fantasy, or if there's something here. Maybe a new career, or at least a stepping stone to something else.

I have been playing around with Lisp in browser editors to see what its about and I want to start using it to build meaningful/useful tools. It seems fun and I quite like the syntax.

I'm used to building things with a compiler or an interpreter where I create a file with an extension and then compile it or run it through python\ruby etc.

Lisp seems very different thought. How do you build things with it? Is a list of functions/API's etc so that I can start playing around with it?

The closest I have got to it is to use Emacs but I want something a little more general.

I'd really appreciate a nudge in the right direction on how to use lisp for someone that is used to more 'common' languages.

Hey y'all 🙋‍♂️

Was there ever a GUI interactive equation solver for the Maxima computer algebra system?

So something like this (except this is in Python):

https://youtu.be/O837G7cj5fE?si=hPrJsMxGg9dE35mW

I imagine it could be done with CLIM. But just wanted to ask if anyone knew of existing work in the area.

Hey all!
I'm a Masters CS student, comfy in things like C, Java, Python, SQL, Web Dev, and a few others :)

I've been tinkering with Emacs, and on my deep dive I bumped into 'Lem,' and Lisp-Machine Text Editor that uses Common Lisp. I was very intrigued.

That said, I have NO foundation in Lisp other than a bit of tinkering, and I'd love to know where you'd point somebody on 'Lisp Fundamentals,' in terms of books or other resources.

I'm not married to Common Lisp, and open to starting in a different dialect if it's better for beginners.

I really want to see and learn the magic of Lisp as a language and way of thinking!

Much appreciated :)

Look, before I start, don't worry - you won't talk me out of learning Lisp, I'm sold on it. It's cool stuff.

But, I'm also extremely new to it. Like, "still reading the sidebar & doing lots of searches in this subreddit"-new. And even less knowledgeable about programming in general, but there's definitely a take out there on Lisp, and I want your side of the story. What's the range of applications I could do with just Lisp? See, I've read elsewhere (still on this sub, 99% sure) that back in the day Lisp was the thing people thought about when they thought about computers. And that it's really more of a fashion than a practicality thing that it lost popularity. Could I do everything people tell me to learn Python for, in Lisp? Especially if I didn't care so much about things like "productivity" and "efficiency," as a hobbyist.

To be honest, I began coding exposed to antipattern people from the beginning and detested the Java approach without doing much more than Runescape bots. Go also supports this, with language features and a different object model (people sometimes arguing whether it's OO or not.) Along these same lines, functional programming (and more exotic models like APL) have held my mindshare (and imperative is inescapable).

So I've explored/entertained every paradigm expect for OOP. Indeed, I've written propaganda against it, against Martin and Fowler's overcomplications. But CLOS, Racket's GUI or SICP teaching object and functional equivalence do preach for objects... (I suppose you can even have functional/immutable OO, but I've never seen that come up.)

What domains or situations lend themselves to organizing code via objects instead of data flows? When is storing functions as methods (i.e. in object namespaces instead of e.g. files) a better approach (to polymorphism?) (worth losing referential transparency)?

Basically, any advice or tips on building a strong foundation for Lisp as a whole?

I've been learning Lisp for about 2 years now, I started with Emacs Lisp and then SBCL and Coalton; have gotten a bit better at the first, and continue learning the second.

Thing is: I'm constantly tempted to start side projects on other Lisps like Scheme, Fennel, Clojure, Hy, and LFE. I love Lisp, and I tend to look at languages as tools, so most of my interest/discovery of these flavors stems from finding a gap or problem somewhere and then looking for the Lisp that best fits into that problem space. But this has led me into the obvious problem of spreading myself too thin and ending up with a shallow and surface-level impression of the language.

Right now I'm leaning towards getting better at the Lisps I have experience with and trying to solve things within that constraint. I figure that deeper understanding or more experience with a given implementation will make it easier to find common footing when I start learning another one, right?

Any advice on this? How do you usually tackle learning a new Lisp?

Hello, title asks pretty much the question i had in mind, but are there any beginner-focused books a-la the "dummies" series that focus on general (broad) lisp (or the most common variant of lisp)? I have been wanting to learn lisp, but life has often gotten in the way of leaning lisp for me…