eli

I just got my first developer position writing in Allegro Common Lisp, and I have to say I really enjoy the language, along with having an IDE that hooks into emacs [1][2]. For someone who is new to software development reading through the code is reasonable to do, and having a REPL at my disposal is quite nice. [1]: https://github.com/franzinc/eli [2]: https://franz.com/support/documentation/current/doc/eli.htm

I've been using packages for so long in CL and I never think about them. I think about other stuff. Like, how do I get format to do that thing I want it to do? I always have to look it up. Packages? They just work and work well. I think RMS is having the same problem really smart people have: if it can't be made perfect I don't want it. I regularly see this in some smart people. They reject stuff because it's not the way they want it, without them being able to articulate why they don't want it. In the early 90's I (and others) wrote not a small package and we used prefixes to avoid problems. It was ugly though, and a real package system would have been nice. For those interested, it's here: https://github.com/franzinc/eli