#’CAR

I suppose everything needs a beginning.

I Br0ke down and started a ‘blog’ (shame on me) to practice writing so I can improve, show the world how crappy my lisp is (hoping someone will point out my mistakes and help me improve (I don’t consider choosing lisp to be a mistake)), and perhaps help someone else when they try to get into CL.

You may be asking “er, why?”, or you may not be asking that *shrug* I’ll tell you anyways. I have a “personal itch”, the kind that is the genesis of new software. It’s the kind of project that has some fun deep technological aspects, and I believe would benefit from the “online community” phenomenon. Smells like a “web app” to me.

I have a reasonable FreeBSD box at my disposal, so why not? Looking over other projects I’ve done (C based CGI’s, PHP sites with SQL backing, etc), as well as experiments and technologies I’ve toyed with (J2EE, jakarta/tomcat, ruby on rails, python, etc.), none of those smelled quite right. I’ve been messing with scheme quite a bit over the last decade, but it seems a bit balkanized and implementations are often quick to run into limitations. Plus I keep getting mocked for using a “toy lisp” instead of the all-mighty common lisp.

Common lisp seems to have all the features I’ve determined to be critical. SBCL runs on FreeBSD, provides an interactive development environment (I’m even forcing myself out of my Vim comfort spot to learn Emacs just for slime. Hunchentoot popped right up after I was able to figure out packages and asdf, and is pleasant to work in.

I’m currently surveying various “web framework” packages, such as UnCommon Web (UCW), Weblocks, BKNR, etc. “kinda like MVC, but bettar!@~”