Best Mac Lisp implementation for programming newbie?

[Sean McAfee]

I've been leading a beginning programmer through Touretzky's "Common
Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Programming." We've reached
chapter 3 and will soon need to move from paper-and-pencil programming
to "real" coding on a computer--a Mac.

Virtually all of my Lisp coding experience comes from writing Emacs
Lisp, so I'm not at all familiar with the differences between the
various Common Lisp offerings for the Mac. (I've downloaded two or
three, but never gotten beyond very basic experimentation.) My student
has previously worked through the Emacs tutorial, but she doesn't use
Emacs regularly (or else I'd consider SLIME), and so I'm thinking that
until she gets up to speed she should use an environment that gets out
of the user's way as much as possible. Any suggestions?

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

I like clisp, and I think it's a good, newbie-friendly, implementation.

But remember that thanks to the fact that CL has a standard definition,
one can write a CL program using any CL implementation, and deploy it
using another CL implementation. As long as one takes care of writing a
conforming program, ie. a program that doesn't take advantage of
implementation specific behavior.

Now, if she doesn't use emacs, perhaps I should advise ccl (clozure cl),
which comes with a nice editor (hemlock) on MacOSX.

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.

[Wade Humeniuk]

The LispWorks Personal Edition. Its got a Source Level Stepper for following the code when running/debugging.

http://www.lispworks.com/products/lispworks.html

Wade

[russell...@yahoo.com]

"Pascal J. Bourguignon" <p...@informatimago.com> writes:

> I like clisp, and I think it's a good, newbie-friendly,
> implementation.

Do backtraces work nicely in the slime debugger with clisp? Without
that, I can't imagine calling clisp newbie friendly.

-russ

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Is slime newbie friendly?

Otherwise, backtraces and the debugger in clisp is much better than what
you have in other free implementations. That's why you need slime with
those other implementations.

See: http://www.cliki.net/TutorialClispDebugger

[Pascal Costanza]

http://common-lisp.net/~dlw/LispSurvey.html


Pascal

--
My website: http://p-cos.net
Common Lisp Document Repository: http://cdr.eurolisp.org
Closer to MOP & ContextL: http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/
The views expressed are my own, and not those of my employer.

[russell...@yahoo.com]

"Pascal J. Bourguignon" <p...@informatimago.com> writes:

> Is slime newbie friendly?

Is that a rhetorical question?

-russ

[Antony]

On 3/20/2012 8:22 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
> russell...@yahoo.com writes:
>
>> "Pascal J. Bourguignon"<p...@informatimago.com> writes:
>>
>>> I like clisp, and I think it's a good, newbie-friendly,
>>> implementation.
>>
>> Do backtraces work nicely in the slime debugger with clisp? Without
>> that, I can't imagine calling clisp newbie friendly.
>
> Is slime newbie friendly?
>

Not going into any other stuff, but just wanted to make one point that
may be important-
One advantage I see with using slime (I use with emacs) is that when you
switch implementations (as I have done enough times to justify this
statement on a personal basis), it helps quite bit. It also facilitates
trying out more than one implementation.
-Antony

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Indeed, in particular, sldb provides a unique interface for the
different implementation specific debuggers.

[RG]

In article <bp8r4wo...@usca1uw-JZWWPM1.sanmateo.corp.akamai.com>,

Clozure.

http://clozure.com/clozurecl.html

rg

[tar...@google.com]

Clozure or Lispworks Personal Edition

[Raffael Cavallaro]

On 2012-03-23 19:10:20 +0000, tar...@google.com said:

> Clozure or Lispworks Personal Edition

Agreed

warmest regards,

Ralph

--
Raffael Cavallaro