Common Lisp: come for the elegance, stay for the power.
Common Lisp is the large programming language that results from a long-running committee process that tried to, among other things, harmonize several competing commercial Lisp implementations. Scheme, a slimmer and purer language, still has a place in my heart, but the longer I use Common Lisp the more I appreciate its alarmingly large ANSI specification. It's packed with things I actually use.
For years my love of the Lisp family of languages was a quirk good only for customizing Emacs and the source of occasional jokes from friends. But the last few years have seen a welcome growth in Lisp's popularity and the development of great libraries for things the ANSI spec doesn't cover: web programming, web clients, regular expressions, graphics, XML manhandling, text processing, etc. I'm making regular use of even an SNMP library. Code I would only have written in Python not too long ago I can now readily produce in a few lines of Lisp:
(defun apache-server-status (url) "construct a plist with a few stats from an Apache HTTP server" (handler-case (ppcre:register-groups-bind (accesses traffic-volume) ("(?m).*<dt>Total accesses: (.*) - Total Traffic: (.*?)</dt>$" (drakma:http-request url)) (list :accesses accesses :traffic-volume traffic-volume)) (usocket:connection-refused-error () (list :error "connection refused"))))
I find myself writing Lisp libraries, now, too. Information about them will go here when they're ready, along with random writings about Lisp and programming as the mood strikes.
Libraries
- simple-rgb, a tool for basic manipulating RGB color values; intended for use in HTML/XML code, not image processing.
- cl-period, period time checking, like my python period.py library, but with a few refinements.
- cl-svg, a pure-lisp library for producing SVG files.
- Gambol, a library providing basic Prolog-like functionality.
If you use ASDF, you'll want my signing key.
