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These years in Common Lisp: 2023-2024 in review (lisp-journey.gitlab.io)
170 points by trocado 19 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 27 comments





The most unexpected news to me was that Hacker News, apparently, runs on top of SBCL now, via a secret implementation of Arc in Common Lisp!

Ya, when are we going to hear about "Clarc"? Where's the source?

I've worked on PAIP, and I think the GitHub.com version - https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/ - gets more attention than the GitHub.io version linked here. The GitHub.io version automatically gets updates, I think, but I'm not verifying the Markdown works over there.

Hey, my little webassembly demo was linked, cool. Nice article!

so was mine!

Everybody forgets about SICL. It's one of the few new CL implementations that's not proprietary or copyleft.

https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL


A few cool thing happened! I might give the CLOS course a try! I’m a functional guy but I feel CLOS isn’t your typical object system.

Indeed, most successful FP languages have their OOP like approaches.

Another thing all modern Lisps have since the 1980's, is all major data structures, not only lists as many think when discussing Lisp.


Having the data structures is nice and all, but using them is kind of painful. They are certainly second class.

Having to use accessor functions or destructuring macros instead of just a period or -> is often annoying too. The lack of syntax has cons as well as pros.


CLOS is great, but CL also supports pure typed FP with https://coalton-lang.github.io

Coalton progress is discussed briefly in the OP: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/these-years-in-common-li...


As someone who's dabbled with Scheme, Clojure, and CL long ago and started wanting to get back into CL, I really enjoyed that course as a combination refresher plus deep dive into some topics I didn't really know before (including CLOS).

As a functional fan, CLOS is amazing.

When I learned CLOS it was the first time OOP started making sense for me.

I've never used CLOS but I loved the metaobject protocol book. So many learnings outside of OOP – it’s a masterclass in API design.

What’s the metaobject protocol book?


No idea how i missed that; thank you.


My main takeaway was multi-methods, they didn't really click for me before I started seriously digging into CLOS. I wish more languages supported them/played around with similar ideas.

Is there a web framework that is reasonably popular/supported?

What do you expect from a web framework? That means different things to different people. I don't really like frameworks, so I used a web-server abstraction layer named "clack."

Radiance[0] is a more traditional web-framework, with interfaces for backend-storage, web-servers, templating, authentication &c.

Hunchentoot gives you basic route definitions out-of-the-box (bring your own database), and for something more full-featured there is CLOG[1] and Reblocks[2]

0: https://shirakumo.github.io/radiance

1: https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

2: https://40ants.com/reblocks/


Might be worth checking out this[1], one of the sites linked from awesome-cl that teaches setting up webdev. And looks like it uses Hunchentoot which is what I've always seen every time I looked into backend webdev in CL

[1]: https://web-apps-in-lisp.github.io/


Caveman2 is a good framework used with lack and clack. There are tutorials on the web.


A complete treasure trove, wonderful!

I really like this, as from an outsider it seems that CL doesn't have a community and the few packages it has are more like building blocks for customizing and implementing you required functionality rather than packaged black boxes. With all those new languages, it appears that the value proposition of CL is dwindling, static checking feels primitive, macros are easily attainable now, and live runtime image manipulation misses the point on the world of short lived containers.

CL has Coalton, which is the implementation of a static type system beyond Haskell 95. Full multiparameter type classes, functional dependencies, some persistent data structures, type-oriented optimization (including specialization and monomorphization). All integrated and native to CL without external tools.

Live image manipulation isn't quite as useful as it once was for runtime program deployment. But it's still a differentiating feature for incremental and interactive development—before you compile binaries to deploy. Tools like Jupyter notebooks don't come close for actual (especially professional) software development.




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