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by mono442 211 days ago
Speaking of lisp, if I wanted to use a lisp nowadays, what would be the best choice, common lisp, clojure or some scheme implementation?
4 comments

Clojure is widely used, opinionated, promotes immutability, has lots of libraries and lively community. It is overall great language, really nicely designed, 100% worth using.

If you want the best performance and need to build executables without JVM then SBCL is a better choice, although probably takes longer to learn.

I wrote my fair share of Clojure, SBCL just had a look at.

Although if your executables are script-like, you can use babashka, which lets you write shell scripts in clojure. Good stdlib, full macro support, shell out to other commands, just a great tool.

I love babashka. I could never convince my company to use clojure for a big project, so now I’m exposing all of my coworkers to clojure by making a set of nice specific-to-our-company utilities in babashka.

Racket of course!

More seriously, there is no one ‘best lisp’.

What you use depends on the needs of the project. That might mean Racket, Guile, Clojure, SBCL or something else. It all depends on what you need to do.

I’ve been playing around with Janet for scripting use cases and it’s pretty cool.
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