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Introduction

Welcome to the amazing world of Common Lisp, the programmable programming language.

This site is one among many gateways to Common Lisp. Its goal is to provide the Common Lisp community with development resources and to work as a starting point for new programmers.

Latest Common-Lisp.net news

2022-02-08

All project sites have moved from https://common-lisp.net/project/<project-name> to https://<project-name>.common-lisp.dev. The former now redirects to the latter, so bookmarks should continue to work. Additionally, we have added new content to our FAQs on how to deploy a website to https://<project-name>.common-lisp.dev, as well as use GitLab CI for testing and more complicated tasks.

2020-04-05

Mailing list archive clean-up: Since the inception of common-lisp.net, hosting of mailing lists has been part of our service offering. For a long time, two or even three mailing lists were created with every new project. Many of those were never used. Today, we cleared out all mailing list archives which didn't have any messages in them and which are not in active operation.

2019-12-27 ABCL fundraiser!

The Common Lisp Foundation hosts an appreciation fundraiser for the ABCL project.

2019-06-01

The Subversion repository maintenance window completed ahead of schedule at 18:00 on June 1st instead of taking the better part of the weekend. During this maintenance window, Subversion repositories were upgraded to the latest standard (1.9). Some repositories were stored in backward compatible formats as far back as 1.1. With the migration, repository access should benefit from performance work done in the server component. Other features that become available with this maintenance include the storage of merge-tracking information.

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Latest Lisp news

What is Common Lisp?

Common Lisp is the modern, multi-paradigm, high-performance,compiled, ANSI-standardized, most prominent (along with Scheme) descendant of the long-running family of Lisp programming languages.

Common Lisp is known for being extremely flexible, having excellent support for object oriented programming, and fast prototyping capabilities. It also sports an extremely powerful macro system that allows you to tailor the language to your application, and a flexible run-time environment that allows modification and debugging of running applications (excellent for server-side development and long-running critical software). It is a multi-paradigm programming language that allows you to choose the approach and paradigm according to your application domain.

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About this site

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"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."

"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."

- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

"One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented."

- Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach

"Lisp is a programmable programming language."

- John Foderaro, CACM, September 1991

"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."

- Alan Kay

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

- Philip Greenspun (Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming)

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

- Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"

"Lisp is a programmer amplifier."

- Martin Rodgers

"Common Lisp, a happy amalgam of the features of previous Lisps."

- Winston & Horn, Lisp

"Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me."

- David Thornley

"SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing."

- Philip Greenspun

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

- Alan Kay

"The greatest single programming language ever designed."

- Alan Kay, on Lisp

"I object to doing things that computers can do."

- Olin Shivers

"Lisp is a language for doing what you've been told is impossible."

- Kent Pitman

"Lisp is the red pill."

- John Fraser

"Within a couple weeks of learning Lisp I found programming in any other language unbearably constraining."

- Paul Graham

"Programming in Lisp is like playing with the primordial forces of the universe. It feels like lightning between your fingertips. No other language even feels close."

- Glenn Ehrlich

"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing."

- Alan Perlis

"Lisp is the most sophisticated programming language I know. It is literally decades ahead of the competition ... it is not possible (as far as I know) to actually use Lisp seriously before reaching the point of no return."

- Christian Lynbech, Road to Lisp

"[Lisp] has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts."

- Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10

"The limits of my language are the limits of my world."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.6, 1918