portacle VS factor

I agree that it's a hurdle.

Portacle, https://portacle.github.io/ , is a way around config and whatnot, lowering the threshold a little.

Reminder that Portacle is a way to try Common Lisp (and its tooling!) in a portable, self-contained way, on all platforms.

https://portacle.github.io/

Thanks for your work! I can definitely see how your project improve CL's accessibility. Not sure if you're aware of the Portacle project, but I think there is an opportunity merging two projects together.

Also it is not much of a kit either since the user is left to install all the tools on their own. User who wants an easy to start kit with Emacs baked in is much better using Portacle or clean Emacs, or some of more polished Emacs distributions like Doom or Prelude together with Roswell for the "kit" part.

Then there's Portacle, a portable Emacs with SBCL, Quicklisp and Emacs goodies (magit, file-tree…) pre-installed. https://portacle.github.io/

There are some updates about Portacle last year. The latest is 1.4c Pre-release. https://github.com/portacle/portacle/releases Without Mac, can not verify it.

See also Portacle: https://portacle.github.io/ It is a portable Emacs that is ready-to-use for CL: it comes with Slime, some Emacs packages, Quicklisp and git.

Others have covered the language, but you'll also want tooling. An easy one to get started with is Portacle. It's a Lisp compiler, emacs with Lisp plugins, QuickLisp package manager, etc. so you don't have to spend time setting it all up.

1) I also love VSCode ... but for Lisp Emacs really is so much better. Look at Portacle. It basically is Emacs that's well configured for Common Lisp with SBCL right out of the box. You'll have to learn how SLIME work (the shortcuts to recompile running Lisp, etc).

My impression so far is (in general), Forth are practically limited to doing embedded/microcontroller development.

For us, web/mobile/desktop app devs, beside:

- 8th (https://8th-dev.com)

- Factor (https://factorcode.org)

Any suggestion which implementation we should look for?

Factor is also very much worth a look. Forth-style syntax, but with many of the ideas from CL and Smalltalk as well. In fact as a CL fan, I was very impressed by it. It's also quite "batteries included" a la Python.

Otherwise, and more seriously, I'm not completely sure variables are needed. Factor is quite usable (it's my favorite go-to language if I quickly need to script something), and mostly doesn't have them.

There's a note on the page from 2022-08-19, that a lot has been added to it. It also links to the github page[1] for the up-to-date changes.

I am a Lisp, April, APL/J/BQE, and Forth[2] aficionado. I did some file munging programs in Factor back in 2012 at my job to sort through theater attendance logs in Word to compile statistics.

[1] https://github.com/remko/waforth

[2] https://factorcode.org/

Is there any "battery-included" ANS Forth (more or less like Python/Go) which provides access to concurrency, networking, database, GUI, etc?

Not an embedded device programmer, but mostly deals with frontend apps, and occasionally backend, so those are very relevant to me.

Or perhaps use "non-traditional" Forths like 8th (https://8th-dev.com) or Factor (https://factorcode.org)?

Here's my day two solution using Factor