clog VS alive-lsp

Reminds me of the approach of CLOG (Common Lisp Omnificent Gui[1]) and its ancestor GNOGA (The GNU Omnificent GUI for Ada[2]).

They also integrate basic components and even graphical UI editor (at least for CLOG), so you can essentially develop the whole thing from inside CL or Ada

[1] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

[2] https://github.com/alire-project/gnoga

For me David Botton [0] with his work including code, support and videos is doing very nice work in this direction.

I use SBCL for everything but work because I cannot get; we are getting there, but like you say, it’s such a nice experience working interactively building fast that it is magic and it’s painful returning to my daily work of Python and typescript/react. It feels like a waste of time/life, really.

[0] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

I was following along on the Windows page and didn't check back on the main README to see if any of the other instructions would help.

It the answer is "latter", then you could look at Common Lisp and Reblocks (https://40ants.com/reblocks/) or CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog).

I haven't used Clojure professionally in 10 years so with a grain of salt here are my thoughts as only one other person answered...

CL over Clojure: it's the OG Lisp that the creator of Clojure used and wanted to continue using but faced too much resistance from management afraid of anything not-Java/not-Oracle, or not-CLR/not-Microsoft, etc. Clojure shipped originally as "just another jar" so devs could "sneak" it in. If you don't have such a management restriction, why Clojure? If you want to integrate CL with the JVM, you can use the ABCL implementation, there's also something from one of the proprietary Lisps. Some useful CL features that are nice in this domain: conditions and restarts mentioned in a sibling comment (very nice to help interactively develop/debug e.g. a selenium webdriver test), ability to easily compile an exe (perhaps useful for microservices, or just to keep your deployment environment clean and not having to care about Lisp), and ability to easily ship with an open local socket allowing you to SSH in (or SSH port forward) and debug/fix/poke around in production (JVM of course lets you attach debuggers to a running process, even certain billion+ dollar companies will have supervised/limited prod debugging sessions for various hairy cases, but it's not as interactive). You should never hear CL advocates claim you can't scale to large teams/groups of engineers or large multi-million-lines sized projects, though you might oddly hear Clojure advocates sometimes claim you can't (and shouldn't) scale to such large projects -- large groups of engineers are a non-issue for them as well though, the challenge is in hiring, not in the language somehow making it impossible to modularize and keep people from stepping on each other.

Clojure over CL: its integration with the JVM is nicer than ABCL's, so if you do actually want a lot of the great world of Java stuff, it's easier to get at. Database integration libraries are better. Access to libs (Clojure or Java) is via Maven, so it's a larger ecosystem with more self-integrating components (especially around monitoring/metrics) than what's available for Lisp via Quicklisp. Clojure is very opinionated, much of it quite tasteful, and that gives the whole ecosystem a certain consistency. (You can have immutable data structures in CL, you can if you want use [] for literal vectors and make them syntactically important e.g. in let bindings, but not everyone will be on board.) Even though its popularity seems to have stopped growing, at least at the same rate as e.g. Go which it was keeping pace with for a while, it's still popular enough with a bigger community; as a proxy measure there are multiple conferences around the world and good talks at adjacent conferences, whereas Lisp mostly just has one conference in Europe per year and only occasional branching outside of that.

If you're doing a client-side-heavy webapp, ClojureScript is still amazing, CL's answers there aren't very compelling with the exception of CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog) which takes an entirely different direction than the usual idea of translating/running Lisp on top of JavaScript and its popular frameworks.

There is the alive extension for vscode which comes with a LSP.

It's a great article. Since then, we have more tools and resources so we can enhance it:

Pick and Editor

The article is right that you can start with anything. Just `load` your .lisp file in the REPL. But even in Vim, Sublime Text, and Atom [and also VSCode] you can get pretty good to very good support. See https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... (also Lem, a CL editor that works for other languages, Jupyter notebooks, Eclipse (basic support) and LispWorks (proprietary, advanced graphical tools).

> if anyone is interested in making a Common Lisp LSP language server, I think it would be a hugely useful contribution to the community.

Here's a new project used for VSCode: https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive-lsp There's also https://github.com/cxxxr/cl-lsp

Other resources

I already linked to it, but the Cookbook (to which I contribute) is a useful reference to see code and get things done, quickly. https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/

While I'm at it, my first shameless plug: after my tutorials written for the Cookbook and my blog, I wanted to do more. Explain, structure, demo real-world Common Lisp. I'm creating this course (there are some free videos): https://www.udemy.com/course/common-lisp-programming/?coupon... (ongoing -50% coupon for June).

Web Development

See the Cookbook, and the awesome list (see below). We have many libraries, you still have to code for things taken for granted in other big frameworks. I have some articles on my blog.

We have new very cool kids in town, especially CLOG, that is like a GUI for the browser. Check it out: https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

Game Development

See again the awesome-cl list. And the Kandria game, in the making, all done in CL: https://kandria.com/ (it just got accepted for a Swiss grant, congratulations).

Unit Testing

We have even more test frameworks since 2018! And some are actually good O_o

Projects

To create a full-featured CL project in one command, look no further, here's my (shameless plug again) project skeleton: https://github.com/vindarel/cl-cookieproject you'll find the equivalent for a web project, lighter alternatives in the README, and a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFc513MJjos&feature=youtu.be

Libraries

He doesn't mention this list, what a shame: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl => the CL ecosystem is probably bigger than you thought. Sincerely, only recently, great packages appeared: CLOG, cl-gserver (actors concurrency), 40ants-doc, official CL support on OVH through Platform.sh, great editor add-ons (Slite test runner, Slime-star modules…), Coalton 1.0 (Haskell-like ML on top of CL), April v1.0 (APL in CL), a Qt 5 "library" (still hard to install), many more… (Clingon CLI args parser, Lish, a Lisp Shell in the making, the Consfigurator deployment service, generic-cl)…

His list is OK, I'd pick another HTTP client and another JSON library (new ones since 2018 too), but that's a detail.

BTW, see also a list of companies: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

Community

We are also on Discord: https://discord.gg/hhk46CE and on Libera Chat.

Implementations

CLASP (CL for C++ on LLVM) reached its v1.0, congrats. https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp/releases/tag/1.0.0