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A Road to Common Lisp (2018)

Posted on August 27th, 2018. I've gotten a bunch of emails asking for advice on how to learn Common Lisp in the present day.

This combination of supporting extremely high-level programming with macros and a reasonable amount of low-level optimization mean that even though the specification is over twenty years old, it's still a good solid base to build on today. It's a scruffy workshop with a big pegboard wall of tools, a thin layer of sawdust on the floor, a filing cabinet in the office with a couple of drawers that open perpendicular to the rest, and there's a weird looking saw with RPLACD written on the side sitting off in a corner where no one's touched it for twenty years. ASDF assumes you have somehow acquired the systems you want to load and stored them on your hard drive, perhaps by sending a check to an address and receiving a copy of the code on floppy disk, as many of my old Lisp books offer in their final pages.

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