clpc

> I really liked Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel ( https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ ) however, ignore the environment setup: the recommendations it makes are no longer maintained, these days Portacle is the best way to get started. A bunch of us from Freenode IRC have formed Common Lisp Programming Challenge (CLPC) at https://github.com/spxy/clpc in order to help beginners get started with Common Lisp (CL) while learning the language from Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel. The outdated environment setup in the book can indeed be a genuine hurdle for a beginner. Portacle is a great way to get started. In the CLPC repository though, we are documenting the steps to set up Emacs, SLIME, etc. from scratch, so that a beginner to the CL ecosystem can try out and understand the traditional way of installing and setting up these tools. If a

A few interesting points that stood out for me: • 40% interact with the Common Lisp (CL) community on Reddit and 32% on IRC. Indeed, in my experience too https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/ and Freenode #lisp channels have active and supportive CL communities. • 89% use SBCL. This is not surprising. SBCL has been the most popular Common Lisp implementation for a long time. • 48% are 32 years old or younger. This is going to help the CL community to stay active for, I believe, at least another 20 years and perhaps even beyond that if the community can attract more programmers to this language. It is a beautiful language that is a joy to program in, so I do wonder why it isn't more popular. • 31% are from the US. Countries like China, India, Netherlands, Poland, etc. have less than 3% respondents to the survey. Incidentally, a bunch of us from F