Posts Tagged common lisp

This confession is out of sequence because I wrote the initial sketch for it earlier and can only now publish it because it is rather heavy in code for a change and that required the new blog version. Anyway.

I have yet to find a single templating system I like, and I've even written my own. Multiple times. Yet, every time I do and every time I look at an existing one, there's just always so many things that bother me and I have yet to figure out a system that I might even begin to like.

As I could not come up with an idea for a confession all day, I present to you two small Common Lisp utility packages I wrote today. One of them is actually useful since it provides a very convenient way to benchmark your functions. The other is a very minimal implementation of something shell-like in CL.

One of the more difficult concepts to explain is that of generic functions, the way Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is done in Common Lisp. Since a lot of people seemed to be confused about it even after having read PCL, I will try my best to explain this anew here.

Continuing on in my endeavour to wrap up some loose ends and missing chapters of PCL I'll take a look at ASDF and Quicklisp. Neither of these are required to use CL —even for large projects— but they can help tremendously to get things done quick. So, let's see what they do and how they may be of use to you.

While Practical Common Lisp is a superb primer on CL I feel like it doesn't cover packages and symbols early or in-depth enough as I still had to learn a lot about them afterwards. This topic as well as ASDF/Quicklisp and Slime/Swank are things that I'll talk about a bit in a few blog entries in the hopes that they may be useful to other people learning CL.

In an effort to get at least something productive done today I decided to take it upon me to talk a bit about my latest project, Parasol. I've attempted to write large GUI oriented applications before, but they never really went anywhere significant. This time seems to fare much better already though, as Parasol has, within barely a week, evolved into a tablet painting application with layers, history, infinite canvas and fancy colour pickers.