vindarel

Developer experience, libraries, performance… (2021/11)

I'll preface this with three things. 1. I prefer schemes over Common Lisps, and I prefer Racket of the Schemes. 2. There is more to it than the points I raise here. 3. I assume you have no previous experience with Lisp, and don't have a preference for Schemes over Common Lisp. With all that out of the way... I would say Common Lisp/SBCL. Let me explain

1. SBCL Is by far the most common of the CL implementations in 2021. It will be the easiest to find help for, easiest to find videos about, and many major open source CL projects are written using SBCL
2. Download a binary directly from the website http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html (even for M1 macs) to get up and running (easy to get started)
3. Great video for setting up Emacs + Slime + Quick Lisp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnWVu8VVDbI

Now as to why Common Lisp over Scheme

chaitanyagupta

Reader Macros in Common Lisp

This post also appears on lisper.in.

Reader macros are perhaps not as famous as ordinary macros. While macros are a great way to create your own DSL, reader macros provide even greater flexibility by allowing you to create entirely new syntax on top of Lisp.

Paul Graham explains them very well in [On Lisp][] (Chapter 17, Read-Macros):

The three big moments in a Lisp expression's life are read-time, compile-time, and runtime. Functions are in control at runtime. Macros give us a chance to perform transformations on programs at compile-time. ...read-macros... do their work at read-time.

areina

Manage your gmail account in emacs with mu4e

There're a lot of combinations to manage your email with emacs, but this works for me. I've a backup and I can manage my daily email.

The stack:

• emacs
• offlineimap
• mu
• mu4e