For those with the windows background looking to get started with common lisp, here are some resources.
– The is by far the easiest and the best way to quickly get started on the “road to lisp”. I have been using it for the last few weeks and I am completely impressed by the features and how well integrated it is with the Windows platform. Highly recommended.
The only caveat, you will have to get used to the emacs editor and might take a bit getting used to if you come from a Visual Studio.NET background like me. But having said that and now that I have a few weeks of experience with emacs, I am quite impressed with and am very productive with the whole emacs/common lisp REPL platform.
In particular I have found the common lisp REPL/top-level tool indispensable and highly productive to quickly test your ideas and do bottom up programming, i.e. you build your programs from small units of code, quickly test it in the REPL to see if it brings the expected result, incorporate the code/modify the code until you get the desired result and so on.
In summary, from my initial observation common lisp and the language/tools and the whole platform associated with it seems to be more in tune with the extreme programming/agile development methodology than any other software development tools that I have used so far.The common lisp language and tools also fits in perfectly with my own minimalist approach to software construction and development. It seems I might just have found “that” tool that I have been looking for.
Those beginning with common lisp might want to look at
In future posts, I will write more about my experience with common lisp, so stay tuned.