In a recent email exchange discussion, Charlotte Herzeel gave a summary of Common Lisp that I believe is worth repeating publicly. With her permission, I repeat her statements here.
“An important reason why I like Common Lisp a lot is that the language has a layered design that supports incremental development. The language provides very high-level programming abstractions, such as object-oriented programming, dynamic multiple dispatch, garbage collection, a meta-object protocol, and so on. These abstractions are typically open implementations, built on top of more efficient low-level abstractions the user can also choose to access directly.
Common Lisp is typically implemented as a compiled language, compiling directly to machine code. The runtime components are sparse, the garbage collector being an important one. Common Lisp provides the means to steer the compiler and runtime components to do low-level optimizations. Examples of this include: type declarations to remove type-checking at runtime; inline declarations to avoid dispatch; dynamic extent declarations to perform stack allocation instead of heap allocation; disassembly of code snippets; tuning of the garbage collector to switch between collection strategies; and so on. Optimizations such as these are optional and localized. Hence it is very easy in Common Lisp to rapidly prototype and then incrementally optimize the code by identifying the hotspots through profiling. This way you can often be as efficient as with C code, without being forced to program in a low-level style from the start throughout your whole program.
Hence in contrast to C/C++, Common Lisp allows you to optimize code incrementally and locally for a particular snippet of code. In contrast to Java - or any other language with an implementation that performs optimization at runtime through tracing or JIT compiling or so - Common Lisp implementations employ in a sense a more classic compilation approach. In this sense, Common Lisp makes it easier to ‘control’ what you are measuring when profiling programs.
The Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is a library in Common Lisp for object-oriented programming. Common Lisp is a multi-paradigm language, so it depends on your problem whether it is a good idea to use object-oriented programming or not. That said, CLOS is very different from mainstream object-oriented programming. It allows multiple inheritance, multiple dispatch, and is based on generic functions, i.e. classes define types, and methods are defined separately as part of generic functions. The CLOS implementation performs a lot of clever optimizations at runtime, for example for method lookup. What is of course special about CLOS, is that it has a meta-object protocol, which allows you to extend/modify CLOS in an organized way. For example, you have hooks into the method dispatch protocol, the slot (= field) access protocol, etc. If you want to know more about the CLOS implementation and the meta-object protocol, read ‘The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol’ by Kiczales, des Rivieres, Bobrow.
Common Lisp just has a lot of advanced language features that you just don’t find in other languages.
From a practical point of view, I can recommend LispWorks as a Common Lisp implementation. LispWorks is very user-friendly because it comes with an integrated development environment. This means you get Smalltalk-like features such as code browsers and inspector tools. Another user-friendly implementation that is free is Clozure Common Lisp. The most widely used open-source implementation is SBCL, which is very stable and very efficient. There are lots of other Common Lisp implementations out there, but I recommend one of these three.
If you want to learn about Common Lisp, I can recommend “Ansi Common Lisp” by Graham. Maybe also interesting: ‘Pascal Costanza’s highly opinionated guide to Common Lisp’ ;-). If you want a funny introduction to Common Lisp, check out the Lisperati. A good place to snoop for Common Lisp war stories is Planet Lisp. If you want to get an idea about libraries, see quicklisp.”
