sketch VS clog

This is a cool library for that stuff as well: https://github.com/vydd/sketch

- You can also doodle in Lisp just like you can doodle with a pencil: https://github.com/vydd/sketch

There's Sketch.

I think sketch is exactly what you’re looking for.

Has anyone been able to install Sketch on Windows?

Thank you. I'm sorry I was harsh, but I just spent a frustratingly long time getting Sketch to work on Windows, but I did it. MSYS2 to compile a missing lib was the missing piece that did it. I'm frustrated, but not giving up.

https://github.com/vydd/sketch

I'm posting my experience hoping someone will tell me I'm doing it wrong and tell me a better way. I'm aware that I could use Racket or Clojure but I really wanted to try Common Lisp as a historically important language.

2 days ago I posted a link that looked really interesting as a fun way to learn Common Lisp. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29856110 or Sketch https://github.com/vydd/sketch

Turns out it was previously posted and got good feedback so I decided to try it. I use Windows. There were several Common Lisp installations to choose from. I choose Clozure because it appeared to be developed by Mac users, so I thought it might to have features I liked.

Clozure installation on Windows was fine. However, I ran into problems installing sketch because I had to build Simple Direct Media components https://www.libsdl.org/ and it wasn't clear ahead of time which ones. I didn't have MinGW, MSYS2 or Cygwin setup so instead I rooted around until I found SDL2.dll and libtiff.dll. Unfortunately, I couldn't find libffi.dll so had to build it. I installed MSYS2 but failed. Cygwin same thing. This is my fault as I never learned how to do this.

I installed Steel Bank Common Lisp without problem hoping it might have what Sketch needs but it doesn't

I gave up on Windows proper and installed WSL2 because I'm on a developers preview of Windows 11 and had read that it does graphics now. I installed Ubuntu 20 into it, but couldn't get it to work.

I switched to my VMWare installation of Ubuntu 20 and failed there too, but I suspected there might be a conflict, so I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 20 in a new virtual machine.

It worked! Very nice. I can do graphics with Common Lisp.

I prefer not using VMWare so I am currently learning the difference between MSYS2, MinGW, Cygwin, and GnuMake32. I expect to have a Windows version working by the end of the day. I wondering if I should do a Docker image or maybe there is something better now? Last time I used Docker it seemed more difficult than it need to be.

// These are the steps I took to make it work on Ubuntu. I don't use Linux that often so I'm sure there is a better way like combining some of these commands

// Install dev tools

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.