LispForum

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the major difference between "functions" and "methods" -- with respect to Lisp and/or CLOS -- was that for methods, CLOS first looks up the most suitable (specialized) version of a method in regard to the given parameters, where...

At ITA, we are convinced that hunchentoot is the best HTTP server in Common Lisp. Previously we used Araneida, which is also quite good, but Hunchentoot is better, and has some things we needed like Unicode support. We have made enhancements to Hunchentoot, which of course have been or will be incor...

There's nothing wrong with your code. However, what you're doing looks a lot like object-oriented programming. As was pointed out, closures can sort of be used as a poor person's OOP mechanism. But, using Common Lisp, you are a rich person: you have CLOS! There are plenty of other uses for closures ...

The question is rather broad. Do we "need" a better type system? Better in what way? That is, it would help to phrase the question in terms of "Lisp's type system has the following problem in the following scenario:". I have heard people criticize the fact that CLOS classes are t...

It has always seemed to me that CLOS is a product of that age when it was in vogue to make everything object oriented. Now, it was written in Lisp, so I know that CLOS and Smalltalk are probably the highlights of OO and the C++ that I use in my day job has prematurely turned me off from OO, but I d...

That's also something that I find a little painful with Lisp; especially the lack of line numbers in the uncaught/REPL error handler stack traces, but the generally mystifying nature of error messages I've been getting as a newbie to the language. There's a lot to be said for messages like "Ar...

Hm, I like CLOS and fairly often use objects. However, I prefer using "regular" functions instead of methods wherever methods aren't explicitly neccessary. In CLOS, you are still using functions. The best way to think about CLOS is that what you're writing is generic functions. (This is c...

At ITA Software, we use CLOS very heavily. One reason is that we have built an object-relational database access subsystem, in which (to simplify a big) every database table corresponds to a CLOS class. However, even when we aren't using that, we still use CLOS heavily. Object-oriented programming i...

You might add "Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computing" by David Touretzky, which is particularly good for beginners. However, "Practical Common Lisp" by Peter Seibel is what we give new hires at ITA Software when they arrive and don't know Common Lisp yet. I voted for ...

I wrote a survey paper about all of the currently-supported Common Lisp implementations, last November. There are actually eleven of them, which I thought was quite impressive. See http://common-lisp.net/~dlw/LispSurvey.html.