2008-09-23

Updating my Common Lisp environment

I've been using LispBox since Peter first announced it. At home I've got both a Mac OS X version (using OpenMCL) as well as a Windows version (using CLISP). I've also tried Lisp In A Box and Ready Lisp (using SBCL).

LispBox has worked great for me but it's time to take off the training wheels. So I've uninstalled all of my ready-to-go Lisp kits, downloaded a fresh snapshot of SLIME and installed a copy of Aquamacs. One day, maybe, I'll be enough hacker to compile Emacs from source but that's going to have to wait a while...and Aquamacs boasts about being so much better in a direct comparison so I've decided to give it a try. I've yet to become familiar with Emacs' way of handling the clipboard anyway so this seems a perfect fit at the moment (Aquamacs allows you to use the "usual" Mac shortcuts).

Installations were a lot easier than I thought. The only problem I ran into was actually that it took some time to get Finder to show the .emacs.d folder (I had to use the menu option Go to folder...). I've already got several CL implementations running (ECL, Clozure and SBCL) on my Mac so now I just have to figure out either how to get SLIME to connect to several Lisps or how to customize Aquamacs so that I can do M-x ECL to start SLIME with ECL.

4 kommentarer:

fogus sa...

Good call on Aquamacs. I use it myself and couldn't be happier.

I have yet to take the Slime plunge, but since my Lisp environment is Clojure I am not sure if it would be useful.

Nice post.
-m

Johan Lindberg sa...

I've yet to try Clojure. I've read and heard much about it and, from what I understand, most people are impressed.

Have you set up any type of connection from Aquamacs or are you invoking programs from terminal? I don't think there's a slime back-end for Clojure (I'm not sure what needs to be done though, it might be very simple to add) but I'm sure that someone will add it eventually.

Are you using Clojure because of the integration with Java/JVM or are there other reasons?

fogus sa...

I am using Clojure for a number of reasons:

- It has solved the library problem plaguing Lisps.

- It is a Lisp-1

- If I want an immediate Lisp environment then I simply have to carry around my USB drive with a single jar file on it.

- It is surprisingly fast.

- The syntax is beautiful.


I've been playing around with it more intensely lately... at the moment I am porting Paul Graham's "On Lisp" to Clojure. :)

-m

Johan Lindberg sa...

at the moment I am porting Paul Graham's "On Lisp" to Clojure.

That looks really cool! I'll have to look into that... someday.