Articulate Common Lisp

How to write Common Lisp in 2018 -
an initiation manual for the uninitiated

Dear Reader,

and welcome, hacker news readers!

One of the key problems in onboarding developers to use modern Common Lisp is the vertical wall of difficulty. Things that are routinely problematic:

  • emacs use. Most people don’t use emacs.
  • Library creation. Putting together ASDF libraries and using them is a fairly horrid experience the first time.
  • Selection of Lisp implementation to use, along with an up-to-date discussion of pros and cons.
  • Putting together serious projects is not commonly discussed.

This site is dedicated to handling these problems. My goal is to put together an introduction/tutorial for practicing professionals and hobbyists from other languages. People who want to get started with Lisp beyond just typing into a REPL. Right now, it feels like this information is less disseminated and much less centralized than it otherwise might be. It’s not intended to be a HOWTO for Common Lisp. That’s been covered quite well. But it is intended to be a HOWTO on how to put together a Lisp environment.

Anyway, I’d like to collaborate with other people to make this a remarkably fine Lisp help site. Contributions are both accepted and welcome. It’s a wholly static site at this point in time - I don’t see a need for articulate-lisp.com to have a dynamic backend. Perhaps/probably one of the code examples will be a webapp.

Happy Hacking,

Paul Nathan

P.S.: feel free to contact me for anything you like.

λ