clog VS py4cl

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.

py4cl and cl4py rely on uiop:launch-program and python's subprocess respectively. These are portable to the extent uiop and subprocess are portable and do not require any additional installation.

If you want to use Python libs from CL, see py4cl: https://github.com/bendudson/py4cl the other way around, calling your efficient CL library from Python: https://github.com/marcoheisig/cl4py/ There might be more CL libraries than you think! https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl (or at least a project sufficiently advanced on your field to join forces ;) )

FYI you can call Python from CL: https://github.com/bendudson/py4cl and CL from Python: https://github.com/marcoheisig/cl4py/

If you don't know Emacs, see other editors: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... If you want the more Smalltalk-like experience I'd go with the free LispWorks version: it has many GUI panes that allow to watch and discover the state of the program.

I personally couldn't stay long with Hylang. You won't get CL niceties: more language features, performance, standalone binaries, interactive debugger (all the niceties of an image-based development)…

I ended up using a fair bit of matplotlib through college and with colleagues. I too don't want to use python, but I also don't like throwing away its libraries, and I'm too lazy to invest in other* plotting ecosystems. In effect, I use up using matplotlib through py4cl/2.

Note that it is not my aim to replace the python ecosystem; I think that is far too lofy a goal to be of any good. My original intention was to interoperate with python through py4cl/2 or the likes, but felt that one needs a Common Lisp library for "small" operations, while "large" operations can be offloaded to python libraries through py4cl/2.

If performance is absolutely not a concern, then third option is using python libraries through py4cl/2. To put it differently, if calling python from lisp is not the bottleneck, then this is a feasible option.

I encourage people to try out Common Lisp because, unlike with Hy, you will get: speed, ability to build binaries, truly interactive image-based development (yes, more interactive than ipython), more static type checks, more language features (no closures in Hy last time I checked), language stability… To reach to Python libs, you have https://github.com/bendudson/py4cl My comparison of Python and CL: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/pythonvslisp/

> Not sure if such a thing already exists for CL

couple of solutions exist for this

https://github.com/bendudson/py4cl

https://github.com/pinterface/burgled-batteries

Ahh, makes sense. Well, if you ever wanna steal some of python's thunder, libpython-clj worked great for me lol. Supposedly py4cl fills a similar role in Common Lisp.