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If someone is considering learning CL effectively, take this piece of advice: use Emacs.

You might think that it's an outdated piece of shit, maybe you hate RMS with a passion or whatever.

But make yourself a favour and use it at least for the month that will take you to go through a manual like this or Practical Common Lisp or several others. Just install SBCL, QuickLisp, Emacs and SLIME (or Sly, that is a more featureful fork) and start hacking. I promise that you won't need more than ten hours to get hooked. Maybe you'll eventually like Emacs.

If you're on Windows, watch this video right now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnWVu8VVDbI

There's a moment at 12:52 when he invokes SLIME from inside Emacs. If you're confused how he does it, it's using Alt-x (or M-x in Emacs slang) and then writing "slime".

Also at 2:40, to make a persistent environment string, there's now an easier way: in PowerShell write "setx HOME c:\Emacs" or whatever directory you choose. I use "C:\Lisp" and I put everything related under it: sbcl, quicklisp, emacs and my own projects.

Other than that, even if the video is ten years old, everything works as advertised. That's true for most of the resources you will find around. Apparently nothing is showing much activity, but that impression is misleading. The core sbcl is getting relentless upgrades and the rest simply works.

For web stuff, use Hunchentoot. Remember that quicklisp makes super-easy to download libraries.

More interesting resources, apart what others have already mentioned:

https://gigamonkeys.com/book/

https://www.youtube.com/@CBaggers/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@GavinFreeborn/videos

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html

#clschool at libera.net.

If some of the authors of those are reading this: a huge thank you!




Some basic Common Lisp videos showing Emacs/Slime in action:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTA6M4yZF0MzsMlNL0N67...


I've just take a quick look but it looks great, thank you!

It seems I'll need to use the Air to follow the series. As far as I can see it's ccl + aquamacs + slime... right? It comes at the right time because I'm starting with the CLOS part right now.


Yes. Though unfortunately CCL does not run on Apple's M chips.


No problem, my Air is old :)




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