On Thu, 2008-11-06 at 13:25 -0800, ·······@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi, I've decided to finally go ahead and learn Common LISP. CL looks
> like a very powerful language that could be of great use to me. I've
> got a little experience with Scheme and a copy of Practical Common
> LISP so I'm not entirely in the dark but I have a few dumb
> questions....
>
> 1.) What do you all recommend as a toolkit for writing GUI apps? I
> played with McCLIM briefly but it was a little too slow for most
> things I'd want to do with it. CLIM does seem pretty neat though. Is
> there a GTK+ or a Tk bridge
Yeah, LTK. Check out cliki.net and cl-user.net for more.
> I know LISPWorks and a few other commercial LISPs offer extensive GUI
> support but there's a couple problems:
>
> - I run a wide variety of machines including UltraSPARC, a couple
> embedded ARM boxes, PowerPC/Intel macs and even an old MicroVAX. I'd
> like my code to be fairly portable across several *NIX machines.
Uh, maybe CLISP - but I don't know.
> - Commercial LISP implementations are horribly expensive. I'm
> learning Common LISP as a hobbyist because I've come to grips with the
> fact that there's a snowball's chance in hell of me EVER getting a job
> writing LISP code. Dropping $600+ on a LISP environment with no
> payoff is not appealing.
Yeah, your hobby could be writing (in Lisp) or improving the free ones
(UI-toolkits etc.) that are out there already then.
..but no one wants to do this.
> 2.) What flavor of CL do you all recommend? Currently I'm running
> SBCL w/ Slime. Getting used to EMACS has been interesting but I
> actually like it now. I'm surprised someone hasn't slapped EMACS on
> top of OSKit and called it an operating system yet.
SBCL+Slime is great.
> 3.) Are there any good LISP OpenGL libraries that anyone can
> recommend? I was thinking of eventually writing a cheesy spaceflight/
> space combat sim. LISP seems like a pretty cool language to do it in.
cl-opengl.
> 4.) Is there a fairly simple web development framework out there with
> things like session management, etc for CL?
Hunchentoot + cl-who + Postmodern + Alexandria etc. combined make up a
framework for web development.
I wouldn't recommend it for a novice (or, well, perhaps not in general
either; only the core is stable really), but I'm working on something
that intends to work as a UI-in-a-web-browser type of thing for CL:
http://groups.google.com/group/symbolicweb
..it works for me. As in; I'm actually using it for "real stuff".