Clozure CL App Reviews

Thats fine to see CCL (Common Lisp) on the Apple Store. Currently, the interface is still somewhat rough, but thats a nice move for LISP lovers.

This version of ccl bundles everything into an App, which is convenient in some ways. Unfortunately, I cant figure out how to run ccl from a shell, or how to build Hemlock in this configuration, which limits its usefulness. Perhaps Im missing something here.

Im glad there is a free IDE for CL available in AppStore. But it looks like it is not finished and polished yet. For now Emacs+Slime is much better, IMO. For Closure CL IDE lacks good manual for IDE, it seems it can not load an init file, there is not autocomplete. It is what has striked my eye at hte first try of the application. Anyway, thanks to developers for the IDE and the Clozure CL itself. I hope they continue to develope them both.

Text highlighting in the editor improved a lot Want features (mostly to bring similar functionality from Emacs SLIME): - autocomplete - make Open and Save dialog optional: once one knows how to work with minibuffer, it is much faster to navigate from there. Or even better, add support fro Dired mode. - list Restarts and Frames (like Emacs) on condition - themes in Hemlock - easier interface to make new keybindings - start listener in a separate process from the editor and other tools, so that the user can restart CCL REPL without restarting the whole IDE (having said this, it starts lightning fast)

We have used CCL for many years. This is not just a great Common Lisp implementation but also a highly agile development platform to create higher level programming languages with.

Clozure CL has its roots in MCL, the excellent Macintosh Common Lisp environment developed by Coral Lisp, and at one time actually owned by Apple. CCL is a new, high performance implementation for the Intel architecture. It also runs on Windows, but is a true OS X implementation. Without question, it is the best Lisp on OS X.

In the 1980s Common Lisp was often user for artificial intelligence applications. It is just a very powerful and expressive dynamic programming language with the most advanced system for object-oriented programming ever devised. It also makes it easy for a programmer to design a new extension to the language for a special purpose (a "domain specific language") and then write a small compiler that translates that language at compile time. Ruby and Python were inspired by lisp, and if you use one of those languages, you will immediately see the resemblance. Computers have gotten quite a bit faster and have much more memory than the 1980s. Back them many programmers chose C or C++ because they had to eek out every bit of performance with small disks and slow processors. Common Lisp implementations, like Clozure CL, include ways of adding (optional) type declarations so the complier can produce run-time code that is nearly as fast as C. With Python or Ruby you are limited by the speed of the application. With CL and a little work you can make your programs quite efficient. The Clozure CL development environment is a joy to work with. Without a lot of annoying pop-ups it gently reminds you of the arguments of any function as you type it in, and there are nice tools for finding functions and classes by name and inspecting even complex data structures. (No syntax highlighting as yet, but I am sure they will add that.) Like other dynamic languages, you can change small parts of your program and your changes are instantly integrated into the running application without having to re-compile the whole thing. Because it is the product of a long heritage of excellent lisp programming environments (the first IDEs), it is quite solid and well thought out. If you are interested in Common Lisp I would recommend getting a book such as Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel (2005) or Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski (2011) and downloading this program. The world has caught up to Common Lisp, and it no longer seems more complex or more resource intensive than the languages and systems we use every day. It is not at all hard to learn, and you will discover quite a bit in the process of learning.

Really great way to get started with CL on OSX. I just started today to try CL for some web programming (yes lisp is great for web stuff too) and Clozure is simply the best to get up and running soon. It comes with a complete IDE so no need to use EMACS which, by itself, is a great plus.