@scathach i also habe entertained the idea of just building stuff in emacs. would be a good way to make it easier to actually use it?

@bonifartius The de-facto standard setup these days is the SBCL compiler with ASDF and Quicklisp for managing systems, usually used from Emacs with either sly or slime mode. I use sly and it's absolutely top-tier

@scathach @bonifartius what kind of stuff do you make with lisp?

@Moon @bonifartius I have several projects going but the big one is a library that provides an abstraction layer that lets you treat your file system as object storage where you can organize files with tags, import URls, and index everything into a full-text search database

@scathach @bonifartius wow that is extremely cool!

@Moon @bonifartius Thanks ^^

It's been slow going and it's very immature right now but I'm hoping to have the core functionality completed to the point of being reasonably useful in a few months

@scathach will try that out this evening, thanks for the recommendations!

@scathach @bonifartius

Yeah, good recommendation. That's basically what i am using (just for hobby, unfortunately).

But, but, but...if I would start again I would first learn Emacs' ELisp. It's quite similar to Common Lisp (esp. with the cl-lisp package) and it's immediately useful for your workflow. And it gives you time to get used to the idiosyncratic Lisp syntax.

@bonifartius @scathach Maybe. Emacs is a very rewarding live Lisp environment. Compilers are subpar but very likely will get better. You can write a TUI that stays useful for decades, free of friction associated with qt or gtk. Lots of applications are written already and are actually used every day, so lots of experience to draw from. The language itself is hackable at a fairly low level in some places — e.g. you can easily patch some functions definers or the object system if something is missing or wrong. Community is large (for Lisp, at least), and so is potential user base for your stuff, and users' interests are diverse. At least one package got decent crowdsourced funding. When taken together, this is a one of a kind phenomenon.

@bonifartius @scathach Last but not least, when you write for Emacs, you contribute to GNU.

@akater @scathach
i did some stuff with Tcl and i quite like it, so i'm kind of familiar with the idea of changing internals and metaprogramming. i don't really have the plan for something specific to write in lisp, i only like to learn new languages from time to time. that's why i had the idea of trying stuff with elisp - i might actually have a use for it then :)

@bonifartius @akater Elisp is only useful if you want to hack on Emacs, but despite recent improvements like cl-lisp and native compilation it's really not a very good language in comparison to CL

Because of its age and overwhelming tech dept Emacs makes for a pretty poor application platform and will hopefully be deprecated sometime in the next decade in favour of a replacement written from the ground up in CL

@scathach @bonifartius I listed some reasons why it's a good platform. Hope for a CL Emacs is old; why would it suddenly appear in the next decade and not before? I would love to use it, esp. with a GPL CL compiler (and it won't be a replacement without one).

Compiler is *the* difference. In terms of language features, Elisp is very similar to CL right now. No conditions, no packages (namespaces), CLOS is incomplete, no streams, no reader macros, no global symbol macros, no multiple values, missing some number and char types — but that's it. Nothing that couldn't be added eventually.

@useless_idiot

Or you might be a real alpha and write your own Lisp.
;-)

@bonifartius