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by medo-bear 753 days ago
Given that you said you had lots of friction with the IDE (equating development in Common Lisp with using Emacs) I'm curious what Common Lisp projects you managed to complete in that state. I also use Racket, and I think it is a fine language, but for my use cases it doesn't really come close to the experience with Common Lisp. Still, alot of interesting projects in that community. Also, curiously, previously said you totally gave up on Common Lisp, but now you say that you use Lispworks, and for embedded of all things. How interesting! Would love it if you shared what you do.
1 comments
nequo 753 days ago
> I also use Racket, and I think it is a fine language, but for my use cases it doesn't really come close to the experience with Common Lisp.

You mentioned in another comment that you use CL to prototype low-level computations. I assume that this is the use case that you are referring to.

Do you mind sharing why CL works better than Racket for prototyping in this domain?

Or do you have another use case for which Racket is less fit than the one I understand?

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medo-bear 752 days ago
One thing I can do in Common Lisp which I can't do (almost) anywhere else (but including Racket) is proper REPL-based interactive development. Specifically, I can update state without needing to recompile my program. For my use case this is unmatched for prototyping.

As regards low-level stuff, this is very implementation specific (which is OK for low-level programming). Specifically, SBCL allows me to write much faster code than Racket. Particularly there does not need to be a speed cap or even penalty for using a high level language.

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