alive VS thirteen-letters

You may be interested in https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive which brings the power of slime to vscode (Mostly, it's relatively new and missing some features, but getting better all the time)

I’ve recently been enjoying using Alive with vscode(and copilot). Everyone suggests emacs+slime but it always felt like too many things to learn at once. Being able to use my usual ide has made it so much more pleasant. Recommend it to newcomers.

https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive

I was motivated to learn some lisp last year but couldn't find any usable plugins for IntelliJ (and I refuse to learn Emacs). I ended up using VSCode with the Alive extension: https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive

Also perhaps collab with this dev. https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive

I also read up on alternatives, and also tried out the alive VSCode extension. Unfortunately, I could not get it to work on my machine.

My recommendation would be Alive, a Visual Studio Code extension. It still has a few rough edges (for example, one bug I tripped on is that it doesn’t work super great with VSCode’s anonymous tabs, it apparently expects a file on disk), but is still far and away the best free non-emacs CL development environment I’ve used.

Note that Common Lisp doesn’t require functional programming. Mutation, side effects, etc. are fine. I just write imperative code for the most part.

My code was quick and dirty, so I don’t think anyone will learn anything from it, but it’s here: https://github.com/jaredkrinke/thirteen-letters

Thirteen Letters is a web-based, competitive word scramble game I made for the Lisp Game Jam (Spring 2023) [0].

The gameplay isn't novel, but it's a multiplayer browser game that's written in 100% Common Lisp (cf. the source code [1]). The front end uses Parenscript, Spinneret, and cl-css to translate s-expressions to JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, respectively. The back end is built using the Hunchentoot web server, Hunchensocket for WebSockets, and yason for JSON, running on SBCL.

I'm fairly new to Common Lisp, so I'm not qualified to dispense advice, but I found having a REPL on the live service to be convenient for monitoring activity, toggling settings, and fixing minor bugs on the fly. It's a lot of fun for hobby projects, although I'd be much more cautious with anything important--I definitely broke the live service a few times by not being careful! I posted a more thorough braindump elsewhere [2].

Let me know what you think! I'm happy to answer any questions. I'll play for a while, to hopefully give people a moderately worth opponent :)

[0] https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2023/rate/2103016

[1] https://github.com/jaredkrinke/thirteen-letters

[2] https://log.schemescape.com/posts/game-development/lisp-game...