[ILUG] c[ommon] lisp v emacs lisp

[David Golden]

Sean has already replied, but I'll just chime in anyway, 'cos I also 
like and use lisp:

To be  vaguely on-topic for a sec, I note there's presently a 
perceptible leaning towards Debian GNU+Linux among the Libre Common  
Lisp crowd - free lisp compilers and third-party lisp libs are 
ready-packaged in debian.  If you're a debian user, the major free 
common lisp implementations are an apt-get away.

There is a larger-than-you-might-think free common lisp community 
focussed on  http://cliki.net

Heh. Maybe there's enough Irish Lispers now for an IL(isp)UG... (Or 
maybe there already is one, and they just haven't told me because I 
smell weird.)

On Wednesday 08 December 2004 16:23, James McCarthy wrote:
> im going to be learning lisp pretty soon(after the 16th of december)
> and i was wondering which is better, emacs lisp or common lisp.
>

Common Lisp, for pretty much anything unless you happen to be writing 
scripts for a general text-editor/virtual-machine/kitchen-sink thingy 
called emacs. 

But you might want to consider Scheme too, if you prefer 
small-and-pretty theoretical elegance   ("Traitor! Unclean!" cry the 
denizens of comp.lang.lisp.  Bah. Learn both I say, you'll be better 
for it.)

Note that if you're using one of the Libre Common Lisp implementations
(e.g. cmucl, sbcl, clisp), you'd be mad not to install emacs + SLIME to 
interact with it, anyway.  

Just a note re the subject line:

"clisp" is the name of a particular implementation of the language 
standard "Common Lisp".  It's a small,  portable bytecode VM 
implementation, and very good in its way.

There are several other free and closed-source implementations, e.g. 
CMUCL, a rather nice free type-inferencing lisp compiler, or its 
friendly-fork SBCL, which has greater focus on portability, and native 
threading support on Linux.  

So it is conventional in the common lisp community to use "clisp" to 
mean the GNU clisp implementation, and CL or just "Lisp" to mean Common 
Lisp.