Top all-time · #14754
Dark Chestnut
Personal blog · darkchestnut.comprogramming
Dark Chestnut is a personal blog at darkchestnut.com about programming. Since 2017, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “Pragmatic reasons for choosing Common Lisp (2017)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-12, and you can follow it by feed.
A blog about Common Lisp, documenting things I learned while writing and deploying programs for use in production.
Most-linked posts?
- Pragmatic reasons for choosing Common Lisp (2017)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-04-24
- Deploy Common Lisp Apps with Confidence2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-04-16
What Hacker News says?
Is there such a thing as a bad Lisp book? ;) Maybe there are only ones you're not ready for yet... (I've been unsuccessfully searching for a hardcover of Art of the Metaobject Protocol for a while, I can make myself ready for it once I have it.) In HN tradition where we all recommend every book we've ever read similar to the submitted one (and Land of Lisp is worth reading), an overlooked recently published booklet…
Comment linking /book-common-lisp-application-deployment/
on “Land of Lisp (2010)”Submitted Pragmatic reasons for choosing Common Lisp (2017) as a story · 18 points
HN discussionThe existence proofs for production code for both Clojure and Common Lisp have been done. That is, large teams, large programs, and making money. I'd point you towards either one. Both have "modern" toolchains, testing and CI support, etc., depending exactly on what you mean by that. I suggest whatever you pick to spend some time trying out a few different workflows though (some of which may hail from before you wer…
Comment linking /book-common-lisp-application-deployment/
on “Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development?”Submitted Pragmatic reasons for choosing Common Lisp as a story · 5 points
HN discussionGood choices depend heavily on circumstances, so, what are you trying to do, for how long, and with whom? Even if what you're trying to do isn't programming per se, but something like betting on how you'll make programming related money in the future, it matters to specify what exactly it is you're trying to do before you evaluate the choices. I think at least it's hard to argue CL would be a bad choice in general,…
Comment linking /2017/pragmatic-reasons-for-choosing-common-lisp/
on “ABCL – Common Lisp on the JVM”Submitted Deploy Common Lisp Apps with Confidence as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> I'm explaining why Lisp is hard to learn. It is not hard to learn in general, there are too many counterexamples of people of all sorts and skills learning it without these issues you are having, learning it as their first, learning it later in their careers... (CL is big , I'll give you that, but each piece can be chewed one at a time and does not seem to be individually that difficult.) So I can hypothesize why…
Comment linking /book-common-lisp-application-deployment/
on “State of Common Lisp Survey 2020”Submitted Pragmatic reasons for choosing Common Lisp as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor Common Lisp you have a lot of options. I think https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/web-dev/ serves as a good overview of entry points for them. There's also a short and relatively recent pay-what-you-want ebook available that might be useful: https://leanpub.com/lispweb (And while I'm at it I appreciated this ebook https://www.darkchestnut.com/book-common-lisp-application-de... for its relevance to the professional p…
Comment linking /book-common-lisp-application-deployment/
on “Lisp in Web-Based Applications (2001)”Using explicit LOADs is fine, Lisp itself doesn't care. Though as you say a bit amateurish in the current year, but professionals did it extensively at one point. (Some probably still do.) Just like in Java, before maven plenty of shops were (some still are) fine with dumping their dependency jars in a thirdparty/ directory and doing everything with ant (or even shell scripts calling javac explicitly). If you're wil…
Comment linking /book-common-lisp-application-deployment/
on “Show HN: Draw L-Systems with Common Lisp”
