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Peter Siebel points out the fact that googling for “common lisp tutorial” gives poor results. I hope that this post will help a bit in improving the situation, because I think Practical Common Lisp is the best introduction to Lisp.

Update
It’s now up to 3^rd place! Not bad.

Today, the SBCL team released the long awaited version 1.0. Besides the bugfixes, this version introduces several interesting optimizations:

• method calls with &OPTIONAL or &KEY arguments are faster and don’t cause extra consing
• MAP and MAP-INTO are significantly faster on vectors whose elements types have been declared.
• Improvements to SB-SPROF:
  • Support for allocation profiling
  • Reduced profiling overhead, especially for long profiling runs

There are also improvements to the Windows port.

Great work! Congratulations, guys.

Rob Warnock has a very good description on c.l.l. of how to deliver a Lisp app with CMUCL. He uses a neat trick to distribute much slimmer updates, and I wonder if it’ll work for SBCL as well.

I have to admit, at first I didn’t understand the idea behind the Lisp dictionary. It just sounded weird. Then, I decided to give it a try and finally got it: it is a text search engine for online Lisp documentation and books. As far as I can see, it currently searches through the hyperspec, Practical Common Lisp and Successful Lisp.

So now, you can finally see what “car” means.

Alan Shields took over the maintenance of Araneida some time ago and is doing a great job with it. Yesterday he created a new tutorial for it, which covers much more things than the previous one. It is in the test repository and you need this version to actually run it.

I’ll try the new stuff out and will post my comments here. And who knows? Maybe I’ll write a tutorial about it too.