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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

I use Common Lisp quite a bit, and I'm just not interested in switching to another Lisp. I've looked at most of them, and haven't seen anything compelling. CL still wins on everything that I care about (performance, portability, libraries, ease of use, books/documentation, etc.).

Even the article's list of areas where Racket is "vastly superior" is questionable, IME. Granted, the author wrote ASDF, so he has a very different perspective than I do on the module system, but in practice nothing on that list has been a problem for me, and a few of them I'd actually consider to be anti-features (like a built-in GUI library).

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What domains are you using CL in? The last time I used a Lisp was inside AutoCAD and it was a lot of fun.

At work I mainly write C++, but I have a little library in CL that I've been working on for a while that can call our REST API, access and filter our log files, connect to our test infrastructure, and some other miscellaneous stuff. It started because I wanted to call our product's REST API from inside Emacs (in the Slime REPL) to make debugging and testing easier, but over time it's grown to about 1500 lines of CL to automate common tasks.

Outside of work it's my go-to language for learning new stuff. I use it for a bunch of little programming projects that I put on Github (https://github.com/jl2?tab=repositories). They're mostly just playing around with whatever topic I'm interested in at a given time. Lots of animations and (simple) computer graphics, some simple games, one or two libraries for the Raspberry Pi, etc. Nothing too exciting.

I want to start contributing to some of the open source libraries and projects (like stumpwm and sbcl) that I use a lot, but so far the few commits I've made to other projects have been really small bug fixes or trivial documentation fixes.

Do you run items in CL that return to an emacs buffer? Like say, slime-eval/run? Or are these just run in the repl itself and displayed there? Been toying with making some async stuff run via swank/slime and then display in emacs in a custom mode and buffer.

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