These years in Common Lisp: 2023-2024 in review
53 comments
·February 18, 2025vtail
Y_Y
Ya, when are we going to hear about "Clarc"? Where's the source?
tmtvl
I read that the source won't be made available because it contains some anti-spam (anti-abuse?) measures that would be easily circumvented if the source were open. Security through obscurity is famously no security at all, but I can see how it can reduce the noise that dang has to deal with a bit.
darthrupert
Anti-spam isn't security in that sense. Perfection is not required when dealing with irritation.
Onavo
Everybody forgets about SICL. It's one of the few new CL implementations that's not proprietary or copyleft.
veqq
Truly, I've never heard of it and it didn't come up searching in any of my favorite spots.
KingMob
I wonder how often people encountering it assume it's a typo of SICP?
pronoiac
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.
nesarkvechnep
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.
pjmlp
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.
ludston
Common Lisp isn't a functional programming language to be clear.
pjmlp
It definitely isn't one, when instead of looking at it with the eyes of CS knowledge, people take the mindset whatever Haskell does.
FP predates Haskell by decades.
fovc
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.
pjmlp
Everything needed is place, there is no second class about using arrays instead of lists.
cenamus
I mean you can write a macro that let's you write
(object -> slot)
and transforms it to (slot object)
"->" should be unused
runevault
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).
nextos
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...
dartos
As a functional fan, CLOS is amazing.
f1shy
When I learned CLOS it was the first time OOP started making sense for me.
asplake
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.
codr7
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.
waynenilsen
Is there a web framework that is reasonably popular/supported?
aidenn0
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
runevault
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
silcoon
Caveman2 is a good framework used with lack and clack. There are tutorials on the web.
cracauer
Too bad the jobs are all gone by now.
-__---____-ZXyw
A complete treasure trove, wonderful!
osmano807
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.
reikonomusha
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.
Greentheodore
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Aguad84
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amatob23
[dead]
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!