Common Lisp Learnings

LISP has tickled my fancy for a long time and it took me even longer to try Common Lisp. To get my mind going after a well-deserved break over the 2024 Christmas holidays, I decided to give it another try, for real this time.

I've been down several avenues trying to get up to speed, but I did not want to use emacs this time round. Instead I've opted for VSCode with an extension that provides utilities for working with .lisp files.

It took more than a single try before I found something that works well, and the extension is alive which also provides its own lsp server (Language Server Protocol).

In the emacs world, there's sly and slime, which I understand is wonderful to work with, but I have not tried to use it.

For VSCode, one of the extensions depended on roswell, which is a:

"Lisp implementation installer/manager, launcher, and much more!"

Eventually I could not get the extension to work at all and I aborted the attempt.

Next up was alive and well, it works amazingly well.

Current Setup

In my current setup I have:

• sbcl 2.5.0, compiled from source - Steel Bank Common Lisp
• Raspberry Pi 4B (arm64) (VSCode with Remote SSH)
• alive with alive-lsp

Resources

Getting the gist of Common Lisp:

• https://lisp-docs.github.io/
• E-book: Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel - https://gigamonkeys.com/book/
• E-book: On Lisp by Paul Graham - https://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
• E-book: Loving Lisp by Mark Watson - https://markwatson.com/books/lovinglisp-site/

Other:

• asdf (comes with sbcl)
• quicklisp (requires setup)

Things to learn

• Packages (code structuring/layout on disk)
• Systems (ASDF - defining systems of packages and dependencies)
• CLOS (Common Lisp Object System)