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Common Lisp Development Tooling
- Keyframe 6mo agoThis reads like AI generated text, which it probably is.
- johnisgood 6mo ago> Opus 4.6, GPT 5.4, Gemini 3.1 were all used to help research and edit this article
- tug2024 6mo ago[dead]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jadefox 6mo agoI noted in the intro which LLM's I had used to research and edit with. Mostly because I could not find a simple map of the tooling layers in common lisp in one place so I "synthesised" one of my own. The map is really what I was in search of and AI helped make it so, however the article has been revised and edited a zillion times by me and contains a lot of contributions from the r/lisp community and for some it still has "LLM voice" so I don't know maybe my "voice" has gone LLM too lol. Anyway if there are any specific corrections or mistakes in the article that need attention I'm always happy to get feedback.
- massysett 6mo agoOk, presume it is. Why is this a useful observation? The author still needed to poke and prod the LLM to produce useful information. She still needed to know what questions to ask and prompts to give, and hopefully steered it right when it made up falsehoods. I’ve used CL for years and the layered model fits with my experience yet I never conceived of it exactly that way. It’s useful. So what if an LLM wrote it?
- jadefox 6mo agoIf it helps, the article “evolved” so I don’t really care that LLM’s had a part to play. I am setting up a development environment for Mezzano, the Common Lisp OS after getting it running on ARM64. I needed to understand the full CL toolchain to build an AI agent harness that could talk to Mezzano. I figured out I could do this via SWANK. But kept hitting the same problem, the information about how all the pieces fit together is scattered across dozens of sources and nobody as far as I can tell had put a complete layered map in one place. Which I kind of already had from all the conversations and research I’ve been doing so I glommed it all together and posted it to r/lisp. BTW the lisp community have been really helpful so I incorporated and continue to add all the corrections and pointers people have been giving. Case in point someone above pointed out vend which is an interesting approach that might be useful for my lisp harness project.
- HexDecOctBin 6mo agoWhen I read an article, I am expecting to read the author's own experiences and insights they gained from them. Not the regurgitation of an industrial scale word generator. > She still needed to know what questions to ask and prompts to give Then publish the prompts. Let me enter them in an LLM of my choosing and see what bullshit it hallucinates and diff it against the 'article'. > hopefully steered it right when it made up falsehoods. "Hopefully"? Publishing something a stochastic parrot dreamed up under your name is ghost writing at best and spreading misinformation at worst.
- __patchbit__ 6mo ago> something a stochastic parrot dreamed up With more time and energy, human discovery and invention, the statistical mechanics backing the information digest will improve beyond any one human's lifetime internalization and idiosyncratic writings divined.
- HexDecOctBin 6mo ago> will improve If only I was capable of such divination.
- rootnod3 6mo agoThere's also vend (https://github.com/fosskers/vend https://github.com/fosskers/vend) for package management and per project isolation.
- jadefox 6mo agoNot sure how my article even made it onto HN but HN has been my home page for 16 years so I'm pretty stoked. A quick note, Common Lisp tooling documentation exists in a LOT of places, but I could not find a single beginner friendly map of the full development stack, so had a long chat with various LLM's to spin one up. Regardless of your views on this approach to things I hope the article helps some people get a better mental model of what the pieces are and how they fit together. It's helped me wade through a lot of choices and debug a few things.
- arikrahman 6mo agoAwesome! I've been reading SICP and Land of Lisp, and wanted to get a good idea of the ecosystem but was overwhelmed by the documentation. Thanks for making it easier for us!
- jadefox 6mo agoThanks, that was exactly me.
- vindarel 6mo agomore importantly, as you precise below, you edited (and somewhat corrected) the article after feedback from /r/lisp. So it isn't only AI output.
- jadefox 6mo agothe r/lisp crew have been a fantastic resource and help, lots of the deepest lisp knowledge there!
- 0bytematt 6mo agoSome time ago I read "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (scheme), but it gave me a lot of appreciation for Lisp in general. It's not that often I stumble upon articles about this language, but when I do I always give them a read. I found this one interesting so I posted it here. Glad it made it to the front page!
- dfortes 6mo agoThere is nothing more tiresome than reading long winding texts written by LLMs.
- jadefox 6mo agolol you are absolutely right, the graphic is really the bit that counts and I made a note directly under it advising that the giant wall of text under it isn't a necessity if the graphic gives you what you need. Will most likely chop the post up into a short one with just the graphic and move the text wall somewhere else. As to why there is a wall of text that is a wall of text in itself.
- shadowgovt 6mo agoFor what it's worth, the wall of text is extremely helpful. I, for one, learn mostly by text and whether or not an LLM generated this, the output is true it is well written and easy to follow. So long as it's also true I'm satisfied.
- jadefox 6mo agoIt's about as accurate as I can make it, it's been revised with input from the crew over at r/lisp and I've verified what I can. Note the real value is simply in the mapping of the layers of the whole CL tooling stack, and how they fit together. That's what made things click for me.
- jadefox 6mo agoFixed it, there is now a link to the reference card that is simply the "map" and the legend with links for the CL tooling. 91% less reading required.
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- hananova 6mo agoAI;DR.
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