Not 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.
Some 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!
Awesome! 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!
This is cool, haven't seen it before and it takes a different approach entirely. It just clones the source code directly into your project. That can definitely go into the isolation layer slot along with Qlot, CLPM, and ocicl.
I 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.
Ok, 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?
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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.
Thanks for the pointer.
Anyway if there are any specific corrections or mistakes in the article that need attention I'm always happy to get feedback.
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?
> Opus 4.6, GPT 5.4, Gemini 3.1 were all used to help research and edit this article