It’s Friday, so I though it would be nice to have a social topic here. So here’s a bunch of questions to stir up some discussions:

  • Which Lisp do you most often program in?
  • What does your Lisp development environment or IDE look like?
  • How did you get started with Lisp? Did you follow any particular articles to set up your environment or begin learning Lisp?
  • Ramin Honary
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    1 year ago
    • Guile Scheme – lots of useful features built-in and a nice package ecosystem almost as good as Racket, it runs the Guix package manager which is the best package manager ever invented. Extremely well documented. Has an active user community and is actively maintained. Uses its own unique virtual machine that runs quite fast with JIT compilation. Stack traces are a little confusing in my opinion, but otherwise is easier to use than other Schemes I have tried. Plus it is an official GNU project, so great for software privacy and freedom.

    • Emacs with the “Geiser” and “Paredit” packages. Geiser is not as nice as SLIME with Common Lisp, but it works. The documentation browser is very good: it can navigate Info-doc, Man pages, and web pages all within the editor.

    • I started with Haskell, which is a functional language in the ML family, not a Lisp. One day I met a well-known Scheme enthusiast named Byrd (co-author of “The Reasoned Schemer” textbook and the “Minikanren” declarative logic programming system), and he almost convinced me that Scheme was better than Haskell. I was already an Emacs user and knew enough about Emacs Lisp that switching from Haskell to Scheme was very easy, and Guile’s documentation made it even easier. I still use Haskell and love it a lot, but lately I have just been focusing on getting good at Scheme.