robert hahn

a darn good web developer

February 09, 2006

Lisp: Second Impressions

Well, I feel a bit weird. I learned today that my post started a bit of discussion on the #lisp irc channel, resulting in a brand new irc channel called #cl-gardeners. To those who read this and got that moving: thank you. Get the word out on it; people will turn to it, I’m sure.

I learned a few other important things too, so if you’re a frustrated Lisp newbie, then check this out:

CL Gardeners is a place for newbies to go - the people behind this genuinely want to break down all the barriers and ensure that you get a good first impression. Clearly their Google ranking needs to come up a bit, so everybody link to them.
Vim fans: there’s good news and, um, news. The good news is that there are some tools for helping you write good Lisp code. See ViLisp, but if you got time, help Larry Clapp out - he’s building out some infrastructure that should result in a very good foundation for building an equally great Vim/SLIME IDE. The project is called SLIMPL – A Perl interface to SLIME Finally, if you used emacs just long enough to see the parens highlighting and wished for something similar, then you might want to check out the Rainbow Parenthesis plugin. If you haven’t figured it out yet, SIMPL is probably going to be the way to go, but it’s not there yet, so hang in there.
I seem to have missed the movie, but if you want to figure out what’s so great about emacs/SLIME, this page has a link to a movie that may do the trick. It’s a torrent; I’ve never done the BitTorrent thing before. Tips for getting OS X user going would be great - look for the friendly comment form!

I want to wrap this post up by saying that I dropped by #cl-gardeners to lurk, but I eventually started asking questions about emacs/SLIME. There’s not many people there, but they’re all quite helpful and friendly. The experience reminded me of my first days on #rubyonrails (when there was only 100 people on it), and that’s a good thing.