Common Lisp needs more documentation, tools and ideas (where are we on this?)

#lisp #commonlisp

This comment is like a mantra on reddit:

Lisp needs more fresh documentation, more fresh tooling, and more fresh ideas.

I don't disagree, but it's sad to read the same comment on threads 10 years ago or today. Let's put some perspective. Did something change for the better in the last years??

Let's see what new things we got since 2018 or so that I'm looking around here. At that time, it was so much more difficult to get into CL.

If you rant, you're allowed to, but please be happy to rant today!

common-lisp.net was revamped (it was pushing people off),
revamped and (way, way, way) better Cookbook,
CL Community Spec (everybody dreamed about this, it's done),
Novaspec,
common-lisp-libraries.readthedocs.io,
better awesome-cl, at least a list of libraries that makes sense, before we only had Cliki (a mess),
Qlot for project-local dependencies à la pip/npm/you name it (not that it's better or that Common Lisp need it, you might not need it),
ocicl (incl. its linter), a new take on package management,
Ultralisp, a new take on Quicklisp distribution,
vend, a new take on libraries management,
mallet, another linter,
more distribution channels of SBCL, including for Windows, including with system libraries baked in,

In the editors front:

newly maintained Atom/Pulsar extension, well developed, featureful,
rediscovered Eclipse plugin,
new VSCode extension (or two?) and LSP tooling, might need more love but hey! It's here and working,
new SLT extension for the Jetbrains IDE,
new extension for Sublime,
new one for Geany,
improved Jupyter kernel and extensions,
improved cl-repl,
new icl tool, an again better cl-repl,
very capable Lem for many languages, with LSP, AI and whatnot,
maybe new tooling for Vim/Neovim,
even free extensions for LispWorks,

and finally:

dare I cite a good Udemy course (there was an old bad one)… not listing libraries (wait, cl-tuition is awesome and fills a gap, wait, Coalton is phenomenal) and not counting other doc or tools attempts and projects waiting for more content or the last touch.

Let's be more precise when ranting please and let's everybody contribute to those most welcome projects and support their creators!

Best,

you'll find all the links somewhere here:

cover image: Lem editor