portacle VS tls1.3

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).

Largely because of myths surrounding it, for example parenthesis syntax and lack of editor support. With paredit, you get meta level direct AST manipulation support in emacs that is still light years ahead of any programming IDE out there. I think the other fear factor is you have to think a lot more about how to approach the problem when writing Common Lisp and it requires a more complete engineer due to a smaller library ecosystem. Usually there is one and sometimes two libraries for doing X and if not you’re up for making a library yourself.

I’m attaching an example of how quickly you can write TLS 1.3 by a single person in Common Lisp. At the time I wrote this library most websites still struggled with TLS 1.3 support.

https://github.com/mateuszb/tls1.3

If you want an example of expressivity you can take a look at

https://github.com/mateuszb/tls1.3/blob/master/elliptic-curv...

For EC crypto with a full NIST vector test.