These years in Common Lisp: 2023-2024 in review
22 comments
·February 18, 2025pronoiac
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.
superdisk
Hey, my little webassembly demo was linked, cool. Nice article!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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).
waynenilsen
Is there a web framework that is reasonably popular/supported?
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
-__---____-ZXyw
A complete treasure trove, wonderful!
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!