Hello! Let us have another Friday social topic.

What type of problems do you solve using Lisp? Please share these details while answering:

  • Which dialect of Lisp do you use?
  • What problems do you solve?
  • Why do you choose Lisp to solve these problems?

I have a feeling that this thread might get inundated with too many Emacs Lisp posts about solving personal productivity problems. That’s fine. But I suggest posting stuff about other dialects of Lisp too. The more dialects of Lisp (CL, Clojure, Racket, etc.) are discussed here, the better! We want to have a good variety of answers on this thread.

  • cadarOPMEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    My answers:

    • Common Lisp
    • Numerical work. Document authoring work. All kinds of numerical stuff like linear algebra, exploring patterns of solutions for complex equations before formulating proofs, document writing. I also write documents as symbolic expressions and convert them to other formats like LaTeX, HTML, etc.
    • I already started with a small bank of functions for doing numerical work back in the days. And from then it just kept growing. That’s why I use Lisp for this stuff. For document authoring, symbolic expressions work surprisingly well as “markup”. Write once and then convert them to LaTeX or HTML or Markdown using different macro definitions for the different symbols used in the “markup”.