portacle VS rhombus-brainstorming

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).

The Racket team has been embarking on the Rhombus project with something they're calling shrubbery notation. The most recent Racket Con (https://con.racket-lang.org/) has several presentations on the topic, and there's a GitHub repo (https://github.com/racket/rhombus-brainstorming) tracking discussion. For what it's worth, I strongly dislike the heavy use of : in this notation.

Once you become a skeptic, other warts began to appear such as the culture (1,2) of the language and one of the active academic members putting a lot of effort into changing the syntax. I concluded that I might as well spend my time just learning common lisp as then I might have a tool I could use. Everything is old in common lisp, and I am coming to recognize that as a good thing. Re-inventing the wheel is not always useful, and a few libraries that everyone uses means they probably function and build.

Matthew has been working on a [prototype](https://github.com/racket/rhombus-brainstorming/pull/163) that works on the current snapshot version of Racket.

It is possible to use to write some basic things and most existing Racket libraries are usable with the prototype.

It is called rhombus and there is an open discussion going on at https://github.com/racket/rhombus-brainstorming

rhombus-brainstorming