What are the best Lisp dialects?

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23

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339

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May 23, 2023

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Updated

Here’s the Deal

21 Options Considered

Best Lisp dialects	Price	Current stable version	Platforms
85 Common Lisp	-	-	-
82 Racket	-	8.5	Linux, Windows, OSX
80 Clojure	-	1.10.1	Windows, Linux, Mac
-- Guile	-	3.0.0	Linux, Windows, OSX
-- Steel Bank Common Lisp	-	-	-

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score 54 · Answer 1

Common Lisp

Top Pro

Flexible, does not force you to a particular paradigm

Common Lisp can be a very flexible language. You can either follow functional paradigms and rules or you can go the imperative route. You can also use OOP because of the powerful Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). See More

Top Con

Macro system suffers from

Top Pro

Portable

Common Lisp is very portable across multiple platforms. With a myriad of implementations available. See More

Top Con

Least powerful macro system in lisp family languages

More powerful macro systems are available in modern scheme implementations (R6RS) or Racket. See More

Top Pro

Debugger and inspector

CL programming paradigm is to "teach" your program what to do by defining functions, variables and classes (this way it is similar to Smalltalk). As a benefit, the great debugger comes for free: the behavior of a function can be tested, debugged and altered on the fly, no need to start the program or recompile the whole program. Debugger also comes with the inspector that lets one to see and alter the components of objects and variables. Overall, debugging options include: tracing, debugging on error, restarts, inspecting variables or results of expressions, including altering their contents, macro-expansion debugging. See More

Top Con

Variable capture problem

“Macros are vulnerable to a problem called variable capture. Variable capture occurs when macroexpansion causes a name clash: when some symbol ends up referring to a variable from another context. Inadvertent variable capture can cause extremely subtle bugs.” See More

Top Pro

Documented, mature & stable ANSI standard plus common lisp HyperSpec

Not a moving target so your working code is unlikely to break next month. See More

Top Con

No implementations comply with CL standard

Making portability a fiction. See More

Top Pro

Lots of production-ready libraries available

Common Lisp is arguably the most useful Lisp to "get things done". One of the main reasons of this is the large community behind it and the large number of libraries and frameworks already built to solve virtually any problem you may have when writing programs to be used by actual users. See More

Top Con

Mutable by default

Top Pro

Condition/restart system

It is easy to recover from errors. Error resolution can be determined by the user at the REPL. See More

Top Con

Macro functionality is hard to use

Top Pro

Carefully designed for interactive use

Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind. See More

Top Con

Little innovation post standardisation

Top Pro

Fast in comparison to most other languages

This is especially true with interpreted ones. See More

Top Con

Old and complicated

Top Pro

Very powerful REPL with SLIME

SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs). See More

Top Con

Too many implementations

There are a lot of Common Lisp implementations out there (CLisp, SBCL, CCL, just to name a few). Some implementations are free and open source, others are proprietary and cost quite a bit. Though none of them follow 100% the Common Lisp standard for example, SBCL fails about 50 official ANSI Common Lisp conformance tests. Having so many implementations may make it hard to develop new libraries because you would have to test it for several different implementations. See More

Top Pro

Software written in Common Lisp can exceed C/C++ performance

Some CL implementations (most notably SBCL) with some careful design can surpass even C/C++ code in production when it comes to efficiency and speed. See More

Top Pro

Image based runtime

The state of the program may be saved and reloaded as an image, supporting safer modification of the running program. New code may be compiled into the image as the program runs, while late binding ensures that symbol redefinitions take effect throughout the program. See More

Top Pro

The most powerful macro system

Macros allow you to run code at compile time. See More

Top Pro

Almost as fast as, or faster than C

Some compilers such as SBCL can be faster than C or other low-level languages, and most compilers can generate fast native code. See More

See All

score 48 · Answer 2

Racket

Top Pro

Free resources to learn Racket

Includes several free online books and great documentation. See More

Top Con

Documentation lacks sample code

While the documentation is well done for the most part, it does lack in the area of sample code. See More

Stephen De Gabrielle's Experience

Good fast lisp. Lots of libraries. The ‘beginner friendly’ IDE is deceptively powerful. Excellent documentation with plenty of examples. See More

Specs

Current stable version:8.5

Platforms:Linux, Windows, OSX

Price:Free

Site:https://racket-lang.org

See All Specs

Top Pro

Less error prone macro system

Racket has both syntax-case and syntax-parse, this makes writing sophisticated macros easier and less error prone than the defmacro-style system. See More

Top Con

Vertically integrated ecosystem

Elias Van Ootegem's Experience

Easy to get started, fun to play around with, comes with a ton of useful packages. Good introduction to lisp and its many dialects. Dr Racket supports other languages like plain old scheme, too See More

Top Pro

Very powerful macros/syntax parsing tools.

This has often been described as a "language for writing languages". See More

Top Con

Restricted macro system in the name of safety

While about half of the abilities of Common Lisp's macros can be had simply, the other half (many of those found in "On Lisp") are impossible or extremely difficult to replicate. See More

IncredibleCeraon's Experience

A very powerful IDE : DrRacket A powerful multi-paradigm programming language See More

Top Pro

DrRacket IDE

This is helpful for beginners. See More

Top Con

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish History

Racket has a long history of employing the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy popularized by Microsoft in its relationship with other Scheme implementations. See More

Top Pro

Easily embeddable

Racket is famously embedded in the game engine underlying Naughty Dog's Uncharted and The Last of Us games, because it proved to be so easy to embed. See More

Top Pro

Superb FFI

Very solid FFI to C code, including effective coordination of Racket GC with whatever allocator is used on the C/C++ side. See More

Top Pro

Large enough dynamic scope to be useful

Racket's use of parameters ensures that there's just enough dynamic scope to be useful without introducing a bunch of global variables. See More

Top Pro

Active community

Racket has an active community of users/developers that makes it easy to get help when needed. See More

Top Pro

Large ecosystem

There's a myriad of packages ready for you to use. This means beginners can quickly build small image generators or even games to help them understand the benefits of functional programming. See More

Top Pro

Syntax fits to functional programming

Although syntax is different from that of mainstream languages, S-expressions are a perfect match to functional programming. See More

Top Pro

Free resources to learn

Includes several free online books and great documentation. See More

Top Pro

Realm of Racket is an excellent entry-level guidebook

Realm of Racket teaches the big-bang approach for managing world state. It does so by walking the reader through the development of small games. There are few guidebooks that are as useful and entertaining. See More

Top Pro

Racket was designed to teach functional programming from the start

Racket is based on Scheme (LISP Family) and is very similar to Clojure. So there are a ton of (). The reason it is easier to learn is that it is not trying to be "Pure" if there is even such a thing in terms of Functional Programming. The great thing about Racket is it has everything included. You get DrRacket for developing programs. You want to add a picture to your software you can insert pictures. If you want to add libraries just open the package manager. The Syntax is an opinion but it really does feel easier to see what is happening since everything is in brackets) Racket is a really a Programming Language for making Programming Languages. So there are smaller syntax Racket called Student Racket which makes things easier to pick up. See More

Top Pro

Language development workbench

Top Pro

Great RPEL IDEA included Dr. Racket

Top Pro

Free resources to learn

Includes several free online books and great documentation. See More

See All

score 60 · Answer 3

Clojure

Top Pro

Huge ecosystem of libraries to work with

There's a very large ecosystem of high-quality Clojure libraries which developers can use. One example is Incanter. It's a great data analytics library and a very powerful tool for dealing with matrices, datasets and csv files. See More

Top Con

Slow startup time

Application startup is slow due to Clojure's namespace initialization and JVM's class loading overhead. Some variants like ClojureScript are faster to load. GraalVM Native Image is also an option, but can be cumbersome to configure. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.10.1

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Price:Free, Open Source

GZipped size:3.7Mb, requires JAVA

See All Specs

Top Pro

Immutable persistent datastructures

Top Con

JVM dependent

Clojure depends on Java's libraries for many basic tasks. But see also ClojureScript and ClojureCLR. See More

Top Pro

Tries to solve problems as simply as possible

Simplicity is one of the pillars on which Clojure is built. Clojure tries to solve many problems in software development as simply as possible. Instead of building complex interfaces, objects or factories, it uses immutability and simple data structures. See More

Top Con

Tied to the JVM and it's limitations

Some language constructs were obviously created as workarounds for JVM limitations. This makes the language much less elegant than it could have been. Also, the JVM has a very cumbersome FFI. See More

Top Pro

Can use a vast collection of libraries written in and for Java

Since Clojure runs in the JVM, it gets compiled in the same bytecode as Java, making it possible to use Java libraries and frameworks in applications written in Clojure. See More

Top Con

Confusing error messages

Clojure's error messages more often than not are very confusing. They usually involve stack traces that do not thoroughly explain where the error was caused or what caused it. See More

Top Pro

Good for writing concurrent programs

This is in part because of the JVM's built-in threading support. The performance of the concurrency model in Clojure is pretty nice as well. See More

Top Con

Data structure fragmentation

Clojure mixes all sorts of data structures into common syntax, including (but not limited to) vectors, hash tables, and sets. This breaks up the uniformity of Lisp and suddenly introduces a lot of complexity to deal with these other data structures. Now, Clojure has kind of addressed this problem and has made functions that deal with data structures in an agnostic way, but the lack of uniformity is still clear as day and it makes the language more complex at a fundamental level than other Lisps. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Clojure compiles to JVM bytecode and runs inside the JVM. This means that applications written in Clojure are cross-platform out of the box. See More

Top Con

Syntax can be alien / jarring for those used to other Lisps

Perhaps some may consider this attribute an advantage. Clojure does not attempt to maintain significant compatibility with other Lisps. So, if you already know a Lisp or are used to the way Lisp works in general, you'll probably be confused if you take a look at Clojure. See these resources for more details on this subject: https://clojure.org/reference/lisps http://stackoverflow.com/q/6008313/2636454 http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/01/one-major-difference-between-clojure.html http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/153128/166211. See More

Top Pro

Minimal syntax

Being a LISP, programs are simple: they're just functions and data. That it doesn't get bogged down with syntax or the loftier FP concepts like monads makes it one of most approachable functional languages for beginners. See More

Top Con

Non-Copyfree License (EPL)

The Eclipse Public License is a business-friendly weak-copyleft license. See More

Top Pro

Pervasive seq abstraction

Top Con

Tied to the JVM and it's limitations.

Some language constructs were obviously created as workarounds for JVM limitations. This makes the language much less elegant than it could have been. Also, the JVM has a very cumbersome FFI. See More

Top Pro

Namespace-qualified syntax quoting

Clojure neatly sidesteps the Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2 argument. Functions in Clojure don't need a separate namespace like Common Lisp, so you can avoid funcalls when using higher-order functions. This makes it feel like a Lisp-1. Clojure's syntax quote automatically includes the current namespace to help avoid collisions in macros, giving you the benefits of a Lisp-2. See More

Top Pro

Rich Hickey

The creator is so awesome, he's a feature. Just look up his talks and see why. See More

Top Pro

Sweet spot in enterprise applications and data manipulation

Most of what enterprise applications do is copy and transform data from A to B. Clojure's immutable data structures and operations for transforming fit that like a glove. The Clojure style of using plain maps instead of classes for everything simplifies many problems. See More

Top Pro

Sweet spot in enterprise applications and data manipulation

Most of what enterprise applications do is copy and transform data from A to B. Clojure's immutable data structures and operations for transforming fit that like a glove. The Clojure style of using plain maps instead of classes for everything simplifies many problems. See More

Top Pro

Leiningen for automating, configuring and managing dependencies

Leiningen is a very useful tool for Clojure developers. It helps wiht automation, configuration and dependency management. It's basically a must for every Clojure project. See More

Top Pro

Immutability is the default

Clojure programmers are highly encouraged to use immutable data in their code. Therefore, most data will be immutable by default. State change is handled by functions (for transformations) and atoms (an abstraction that encapsulates the idea of some entity having an identity). See More

Top Pro

Cleanly compiles to JVM, JavaScript, and .net

Clojure's syntax/API are designed to interact well with the environment of a host language, meaning it's pretty easy to write code which runs without modification on all three platforms. Plus, you can directly interact with code on the host language, and switch out your code based on which host language you use. See More

Top Pro

Extensible

Clojure has an elegant macro system which enables language additions, Domain-specific languages (DSLs), to be created much easier than most other languages (with the exception of Racket, perhaps). See More

Top Pro

Dynamic language

A superb data processing language. While rich type and specification systems are available they are optional. See More

Top Pro

Great tool used in automating, configuring and managing dependencies available

Leiningen is a very useful tool for Clojure developers. It helps wiht automation, configuration and dependency management. It's basically a must for every Clojure project. See More

Top Pro

No C/Java syntax

Refreshing, BTW! See More

Top Pro

Game is available with which you can learn Clojure

Nightmod is a tool used to make "live-moddable" games. It displays the game's code while you are playing and allows you to inject new code using Clojure. This can be a fun and useful experience for people trying to learn Clojure. See More

See All

score 16 · Answer 4

Guile

Top Pro

GNU's official extension language

Chances are a system running enough GNU software will already have it installed. See More

ConscientiousThaleia's Experience

Simple integration with C code, mature OO library (GOOPS), support for custom languages. See More

Specs

Current stable version:3.0.0

Platforms:Linux, Windows, OSX

Price:Free

Typing discipline:Dynamically typed

Top Pro

Easy to customize and extend applications

Guile makes it easy for users of your application to write extensions without needing to understand the plumbing of your program. See More

Arne Babenhauserheide's Experience

After some time its technical elegance starts to really shine. See More

Top Pro

Excellent documentation

The documentation provides conceptual overviews, tutorials, and a detailed reference for all commands, functions and operators. See More

Top Pro

Object oriented programming with multiple-dispatch

Comes with a library for developing object-oriented programs using generics with multiple-dispatch. See More

See All

score 17 · Answer 5

Steel Bank Common Lisp

Top Pro

One of the fastest Common Lisp implementations

Top Con

Windows version not stable

Especially for multithreaded code. See More

PrivatePotrympus's Experience

FFI is thorough and remarkable. Used successfully in hardcore projects with C libraries on the metal. Strong alternative to C++. See More

Top Pro

Modern Features (ex. Unicode, Threading)

Top Pro

Copyfree Licenses (MIT, BSD, Public Domain)

Top Pro

Standalone Executables

Top Pro

Actively maintained

Bug-fixes, performance improvements, refinements. New ports. See More

Top Pro

Free Open Source Software

Parts of SBCL are licensed under a BSD-Style license. The rest are in the public domain. See More

Top Pro

Fast native code compiler

SBCL (and CMUCL)'s compiler, Python, produces optimized native code. See More

Top Pro

Type inference and type checking

Incorrect type declarations are treated as errors. SBCL can deduce types quite well. See More

Top Pro

Alternative to C++

See All

score 10 · Answer 6

MIT/GNU Scheme

Top Pro

No Magic - it's clear how everything works

Scheme has far less built into the language itself, helping students see that things like OOP are not magical: they are just patterns for organizing code. Everything in Scheme is built up from a very small set of primitives which compose in a natural and intuitive fashion. Having a language that does not accord many things special status helps keep students open minded. This will help students later go between different languages and paradigms from procedural to object-oriented to functional. See More

Top Con

Not copyfree licensed (GPLv2+)

The GNU GPL is a strong copyleft license. See More

Top Pro

Great, well known textbooks available

There is a set of very strong textbooks introducing CS and programming using Scheme. These books are available for free online. The most famous example--and one of the most famous CS books full stop--is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs usually known as SICP. This book introduces fundamental ideas in computer science and covers an incredible amount of material quickly and clearly without requiring any prior knowledge. Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics is another notable example, especially in the light of increasing use of robotics. Can one imagine "Structure and Interpretation of [Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity, Quantum Field Theory, Statistical Mechanics, Solid-State Physics, Quantum Optics, Quantum Computing, ...]" Of course one can! See More

Top Con

Ivory tower community

Even outside academia, the community focus has not historically been conducive to getting practical work done. See More

Top Pro

Simple syntax

Scheme syntax is extremely regular and easy to pick up. A formal specification of the syntax fits onto just a few pages; it can be introduced informally in a paragraph or two. Students are not distracted by remembering how to write if statements or loops or even operator precedence because every syntactic follows the same pattern. Ultimately, everything looks something like this: (func a b c) This includes not only user-defined functions but even control flow: (if cond then-clause else-clause) or even primitive operations like define and set: (define foo 10) (set! foo 11) This means that nothing really has special syntactic treatment in the language. There are essentially no weird edge-cases to memorize, and different concepts are given a more equal weight in the language. (Unlike Algol-like languages which tend to given undue weight to loops and assignment statements, for example.) See More

Top Con

Not widely used in the industry

Scheme is mainly a language used in academia and as a learning tool functional programming concepts or just programming concepts in general. It's not a very popular language used for building software that will be used in the industry. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Top Con

Doesn't work with Geiser on Emacs

Geiser is Scheme IDE for GNU Emacs, providing many features including REPL integration, code evaluation and debugging, macro-expansion, code navigation, auto-completion, etc. Doesn't work with MIT Scheme. See More

Top Pro

Elegant idioms

Top Con

Lots of undocumented features

Example: MIT Scheme does have packages system (separate namespaces), but they are undocumented. See More

Top Pro

Powerful hygienic macro system

Top Con

Has problems running on Windows

While the port to Windows exists, the experience is not as good as on *nix systems. A known bug that hasn't been fixed for a long time: Edwin on 64-bit Widows cannot load existing file from hard drive. See More

See All

score 9 · Answer 7

Hy

Top Pro

Python interop

Hy compiles to Python's abstract syntax trees. Python can import Hy modules, and Hy can import Python modules. See More

Top Pro

Easier to read

Distinguished between arrays (or vectors) and function calls by using [] and (), respectively. See More

Top Pro

Copyfree and open source

Uses the MIT (expat) license. See More

See All

score 13 · Answer 8

Chicken Scheme

Top Con

Lacks proper UTF-8 support

For more detail see http://bugs.call-cc.org/ticket/1374 It's been up there for 9 months, still not fixed. See More

Top Pro

Has full numerical tower

As of chicken 5 the full numerical tower is the default. See More

Top Con

Lacks numeric tower support

The core system currently does not support the full numeric tower. However, there is an extension library available. See More

Top Pro

Easy embedding into C programs

Top Pro

High performance

I tried running a benchmark representative of what I want to do (heavy on lists and symbols, no vectors or arithmetic, usual caveat, if your workload differs your mileage may vary) and Chicken Scheme was faster than any other Lisp dialect that supports Windows. See More

Top Pro

Fast interpreter or compile to C; many libs in C

Top Pro

Copyfree License (BSD)

Top Pro

Powerful Hygienic Macros

Top Pro

Cross-platform compilation (incl Win, Haiku, Android, iOS)

Top Pro

Package Manager (chicken-install) with 700+ "eggs"

Top Pro

Elegant Idioms

See All

score 5 · Answer 9

ClojureScript

Top Pro

Excellent tools for web development

ClojureScript has superb wrappers around React.js (see Reagent) that make building single-page apps a breeze. With figwheel, it's a web dev experience unlike any other -- hotloaded code, repl interaction, and instantly reflected changes make good development fun and fast. You can add things like Garden to make CSS-writing part of the same holistic experience and suddenly all development is a pleasant, smooth process. See More

Top Con

Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp

Lisp is sometimes called "syntax-less" and this is bewildering to those steeped in Algol-type syntax (Java, Javascript, C, etc). Being a dialect of Lisp, ClojureScript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language. See More

Specs

Current stable version:1.9

GZipped size:32 kB

Top Pro

Share application logic between browser and Clojure server

Clojure is also able to run web servers, so one can reap similar benefits to NodeJS in terms of sharing code between client and server. See More

Top Pro

The Spec core library

From the creator of Clojure: Spec is a new core library (Clojure 1.9 and Clojurescript) to support data and function specifications in Clojure. Writing a spec should enable automatic: Validation, Error reporting, Destructuring, Instrumentation, Test-data generation and Generative test generation. "Spec" is an instance of "opt-in static type checking," rather like Python's MyPy. Opt-in is the right answer, in my opinion, because static typing with no escape hatch is tyranny, forcing developers to implement simulations of dynamic typing when that is required, as with remotable query expressions. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries

Clojure and ClojureScript are designed to be able to interact with their host. So the language by design makes it is easy to use existing JS libraries. See More

Top Pro

Simple syntax

Lispness makes ClojureScript trivial to comprehend after an initial learning overhead. See More

Top Pro

Excellent build tools

Both Leiningen and Boot are great build tools that manage code dependencies and deployment. See More

Top Pro

Can be used with React out of the box

Top Pro

Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations

Google's Closure Library converts regular JavaScript into a highly optimized form - including dead code analysis/elimination. It can even remove pieces of unused code from 3rd party libraries (eg, if you import jQuery but only use one function, Google Closure includes only that piece). See More

Top Pro

Live interactive programming with figwheel

Figwheel builds your ClojureScript code and hot loads it into the browser as you are coding! Every time you save your ClojureScript source file, the changes are sent to the browser so that you can see the effects of modifying your code in real time. See More

See All

score 12 · Answer 10

GNU Emacs Lisp

Top Con

Not very useful outside of extending Emacs

Top Pro

If you use Emacs, it's a good language for what it does (better than VimL)

Top Con

Very Low-Power Lisp Dialect

Top Pro

Has lots of uses in Emacs

Top Con

A strange dialect, outdated dialect

Top Con

Not Copyfree

See All

score 3 · Answer 11

Ypsilon Scheme

Top Pro

Concurrent Garbage Collection

Top Pro

Elegant Idioms

Top Pro

Copyfree Licensed

Top Pro

Powerful Hygienic Macro System

See All

score 3 · Answer 12

CMUCL

Top Pro

Fast execution, faster compilation

CMUCL runs about as fast as SBCL, and they are both among the fastest Common Lisp implementations. CMUCL compiles faster than SBCL, cutting down on development, deployment, installation, and user testing turnaround time. See More

Top Con

No Windows version

Top Pro

Stand-alone executables

Top Pro

Copyfree licensed (revised BSD license)

Most of CMUCL is in the public domain, with a few subsytems under permissive license. See More

See All

score 9 · Answer 13

PicoLisp

Top Pro

Integrated database and Prolog engine

Top Con

Lack of Floating point data type

The language does not have floating point numbers only scaled fix-point numbers. Scaling of numbers is more work than directly working with floats. See More

ChattyOyamatsumi's Experience

The language is very simple. It takes less effort to learn the system and is quite intuitive. Where other lisp dialects are complicated and verbose. The tacit and convenience features offered by the language interpreter make it a joy to code in. See More

Top Pro

Fast code execution speed

One of the fastest code execution speeds compared to other Lisp dialects. See More

Top Pro

Simplicity

Compared to other Lisp dialects, it's simple and doesn't have unnecessary features. See More

Top Pro

Tacit

Code written in is short and easier to understand most of the time. See More

Top Pro

Foreign function interface

The language has built-in FFI for C and also interfaces with java(via ersatz) See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 14

Embeddable Common Lisp

Top Pro

Compiles to C

Top Con

Non-copyfree (LGPL)

LGPL is a weak copyleft license. See More

Top Pro

Lives up to its name

I have used this in embedded robotic controllers. Very refreshing to have a Lisp for such applications, especially as regards incremental development and test-driven development. See More

Top Con

No way to save the data from a runnin Lisp process to a file

A lot of Common Lisp implementations provide a feature to dump all the current data available in a running Lisp process into a file. ECL does not provide this feature. See More

Top Pro

Open source

See All

score 1 · Answer 15

Pixie

Add Video or Image

score 1 · Answer 16

Kawa Scheme

Top Pro

Java interop

score 3 · Answer 17

TXR Lisp

Current stable version:197

Price:Free

GZipped size:5-6 Mb

Site:https://www.nongnu.org/txr

See All Specs

score 2 · Answer 18

Armed Bear Common Lisp

Top Pro

Can be integrated into java programs for scripting capabilities

Top Con

The java API isn't always enough

Some of its features are made private and can't easily be modified from java. See More

PassionateBudai's Experience

its pretty nice to work with See More

Top Pro

Fairly simple to learn and use

Written and interoperable with Java. See More

Top Con

Can be slow and clunky because of the java overhead

It is using java. Java is slow. Ergo: abcl is slow. See More

See All

score 2 · Answer 19

RamdaScript

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21 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Common Lisp

My Recommendation for Common Lisp

Flexible, does not force you to a particular paradigm

Macro system suffers from

Portable

Least powerful macro system in lisp family languages

Debugger and inspector

Variable capture problem

Documented, mature & stable ANSI standard plus common lisp HyperSpec

No implementations comply with CL standard

Lots of production-ready libraries available

Mutable by default

Condition/restart system

Macro functionality is hard to use

Carefully designed for interactive use

Little innovation post standardisation

Fast in comparison to most other languages

Old and complicated

Very powerful REPL with SLIME

Too many implementations

Software written in Common Lisp can exceed C/C++ performance

Image based runtime

The most powerful macro system

Almost as fast as, or faster than C

My Recommendation for Racket

My Recommendation for Racket

Free resources to learn Racket

Documentation lacks sample code

Less error prone macro system

Vertically integrated ecosystem

Very powerful macros/syntax parsing tools.

Restricted macro system in the name of safety

DrRacket IDE

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish History

Easily embeddable

Superb FFI

Large enough dynamic scope to be useful

Active community

Large ecosystem

Syntax fits to functional programming

Free resources to learn

Realm of Racket is an excellent entry-level guidebook

Racket was designed to teach functional programming from the start

Language development workbench

Great RPEL IDEA included Dr. Racket

Free resources to learn

My Recommendation for Clojure

My Recommendation for Clojure

Huge ecosystem of libraries to work with

Slow startup time

Immutable persistent datastructures

JVM dependent

Tries to solve problems as simply as possible

Tied to the JVM and it's limitations

Can use a vast collection of libraries written in and for Java

Confusing error messages

Good for writing concurrent programs

Data structure fragmentation

Cross platform

Syntax can be alien / jarring for those used to other Lisps

Minimal syntax

Non-Copyfree License (EPL)

Pervasive seq abstraction

Tied to the JVM and it's limitations.

Namespace-qualified syntax quoting

Rich Hickey

Sweet spot in enterprise applications and data manipulation

Sweet spot in enterprise applications and data manipulation

Leiningen for automating, configuring and managing dependencies

Immutability is the default

Cleanly compiles to JVM, JavaScript, and .net

Extensible

Dynamic language

Great tool used in automating, configuring and managing dependencies available

No C/Java syntax

Game is available with which you can learn Clojure

My Recommendation for Guile

My Recommendation for Guile

GNU's official extension language