I was astonished when I started learning Common Lisp last year: the language, despite its warts, feels modern and convenient, and the ecosystem - SLIME, asdf & quicklisp - is impressively well designed and surprisingly nice to use.
Yes, CL does have its share of historical baggage and warts. Despite those, I think it's still the best dynamically typed language. The rich number types, with arbitrary-precision integers by default, single- and double-floats, ratios, and complex numbers all built in; macros; and multimethods -- CL still has major features that the other dynamic languages, rather inexplicably to my mind, have yet to embrace. It's also much faster than Python or (especially) Ruby, and would be much faster than JavaScript but for the massive amount of effort that's gone into JIT compilation of this now-ubiquitous language.
If you're coming from a Haskell, F#, or even Scala or Ruby background, you might appreciate my functional collections library for CL [0]. It expands the range of code that can easily be written functionally.
Even if you don't have that experience, you might find FSet interesting, but it will take a little longer to wrap your head around.
One of the best, for sure. There are Racket and Clojure in the Lisp family, both comparable to Common Lisp in terms of features. Outside of that, there is Elixir, which in my mind gave Erlang enough additional features to also finally be at that level. Pharo is another language - a modern Smalltalk-inspired, image based GUI environment - which comes close in terms of expressivity, but is nowhere near CL implementations in terms of stability. There's also REBOL and recently also Red. They all differ, of course, but what they have in common is the amount of features such languages offer and the unique kind of synergy you get from each of them. It is still unmatched by currently mainstream dynamically typed languages.
> you might appreciate my functional collections library for CL
Thanks, looks interesting. I'll take a look later. I think one of the most irritating things when I started learning Common Lisp was weird naming of common functions. In Emacs Lisp-land we got dash.el and s.el which made the situation (mostly) better; similar thing was done by Underscore.js. I think something like this could be helpful in CL - maybe your library could fill that role for me.
There is a reason the Catholic Church uses Latin for important documents. The fact that Latin is a dead language means that the meaning of those documents won't change over time.
Thanks, but I'm not very productive in Lisp. Lisp development environments need emacs and emacs and my brains are not compatible. I've tried the 15 years to pick it up time and again but to no avail. Last time I even made a cheat sheet for myself (a link here as a proof of effort):
LispWorks is really nice. I've seen some people using Dandelion with Eclipse (although never tried it myself). It's also possible to interact with SWANK in vim, if you're into such things.
> Inkscape
Wow. Never even thought of it in such a context. I'll definitely give it a try.
