Common Lisp

Tuesday, April 6, 2010 :: Tagged under: pablolife plt engineering. ⏰ 2 minutes.


Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄


I've been playing around with Common Lisp recently, using Practical Common Lisp and Let Over Lambda as guides (not gonna lie, having LOL on the spine of your book is wonderful). Last year when I went through my Scheme phase (the original URL of this blog was littleschemer.blogspot.com), I never thought I'd see the day that I'd switch sides.

A big ole lambda

FWIW, this is my iPhone background image.

I do feel like a traitor though, since even though I'm a theory-head and advocate of FP, I'm loving Common Lisp. There are a few reasons for this:

This isn't to say its all peaches and cream: I still prefer Scheme's single namespace over Common Lisp's, I prefer Scheme's naming conventions (map vs. mapcar, or worse, loop for elem in list collecting). And issues with lambdas, namely sharp-quoting and not being able to place functions in the function position (especially after learning the beauty of Scheme's semantics so well last semester) still throw me for a loop.

But after a year of mounting tension with the residents of Shelbyville, I realize they've got quite a bit right ^_^.

Thanks for the read! Disagreed? Violent agreement!? Feel free to join my mailing list, drop me a line at , or leave a comment below! I'd love to hear from you 😄