u/MWatson

Very cool, it seems to work fine so far.

Years ago I used CCL (and LispWorks and SBCL). This is the first time I have been able to run CCL on my Apple Silicon Macs for many years.

Is it too late? I have put a lot of effort into writing my Racket book the last few years. I would enjoy talking about how Racket is a great fit for exploratory programming.

I love Racket, use it all the time, but so far I can’t crank up my excitement level for Rhombus, but it will come when I see a few large interesting programs written in Rhombus. Any suggestions?

I have experimented with category theory approach to deep learning (so far just in Common Lisp and Racket, but a Scala imp,ementagion is on my list…)

I just released a Scala AI book, and I targeted it at people who might not have much experience with the language by using a language subset and including a short chapter on just the idioms I use in the book.

I will try to remember to come back here in a few weeks after I get some reader feedback.

I look forward to looking at your implementation if you do this project. I am a lover of Common Lisp but I was unable to implement background threads with smooth interruptions that would work with both SBCL and LispWorks (I ended up porting my project to Racket, which I didn't really want to do.)

I have been using your Jolt system to produce natively compiled apps, love it! I need to try the JS backend.

I like your Docker setup supporting MARIADB. One suggestion: for devs who might not always want to use Docker (and already are set up for MARIADB, MYSQL, POSTGRES, SQLITE, etc.) perhaps add a short note at the bottom of your README.md file with suggestions for not using Docker.

I forgot to add the GitHub repo for the examples, manuscript, and figures in the book: https://github.com/mark-watson/PrologAIBook

Steve, cool idea! I have experimented before with Python and Prolog, and supporting Prolog LLM tools seems like it should scale to large projects.

Well maybe not a mistake per se, but learning just four kr five programming languages would have been enough.

In the last 40 years I have made the mistake of using too many different programming languages because it was a turn on to learn so many languages.

Common Lisp is a great language for exploring ideas and experimenting. I would suggest picking up at least one additional language also:

If you like machine learning, Python is an obvious choice. If you like server side dev, Java, Clojure, Erlang, etc. are all good. Choose one.

I have offered free mentoring for about 15 hears and programming language selection is one of the questions I get a lot. I love developing in Common Lisp, but depending on the individual I often suggest not using Common Lisp.

This might be unpopular advice, but write up four or five paragraphs describing the types of software and systems you want to write, and use this description as context for asking Gemini 2.5 Pro or o3 to evaluate the efficacy of the programming languages you are interesting. Don‘t just accept the responses, rather use them to do your own evaluation.

as a life time Democrat and a US citizen, this provocation by France really offends me, if this post is actually legit.

I use Claude Sonnet on the https://apps.abacus.ai/chatllm service e (costs $10/month, and also gives access to GPT-4o, Gemini Pro 1.5, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Grok, Deepseek v3, etc.)

I do have LLM support in Emacs and when I rarely use IntelliJ projects I have direct LLM support there also. I prefer just copying in code that I want analyzed to a web interface, or use a web interface for coding questions.

Yes, I am the author of 'Loving Common Lisp'.

My favorite CL book is probably "Programming Artificial Intelligence Paradigms" by Peter Norvig. Peter wrote that the same time I wrote my Springer-Verlag CL book.

I have written a few Common Lisp books and used the language since around 1982.

I would say yes! One reason is that LLMs can be accessed and used by clients in any language, so we now avoid problems like available ML libraries (but there are some good ones for CL).

The other reason I say yes! is because it is a great prototyping and exploration language.

However: for young people interested in AI development, starting with Python makes sense. For older developers like myself who are used to Common Lisp, there is no reason to stop using the language.

Take my advice with a grain of salt because I am just an amateur Haskell enthusiast:

Do set up VSCode, as per other advice here, but also spend a lot of time in a REPL experimenting.

When you get a compilation or runtime error, try to figure out what is wrong for a minute or two, then paste your code and output into one of Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. They all know Haskell. We aren’t living in 2022 anymore, so take advantage of modern tech.

O1 is good, but I now usually use the gpt-4o-mini model with the APIs because it is so much cheaper, like by a factor of 20x for gpt-o, and and o1 and o1-mini are even more expensive.

I like hy-mode, not been updated in several years, but it handles the job nicely.

Thank you!

Why was text of my announcement deleted?

Thanks, I will try that.