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Practical Common Lisp VS Steel Bank Common Lisp

Compare Practical Common Lisp VS Steel Bank Common Lisp and see what are their differences

Practical Common Lisp logo Practical Common Lisp

Learning Resources

Steel Bank Common Lisp logo Steel Bank Common Lisp

Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is a high performance Common Lisp compiler.
  • Practical Common Lisp Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-12-25
  • Steel Bank Common Lisp Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-04-24

Practical Common Lisp features and specs

  • Comprehensive Introduction
    The book offers a thorough introduction to Common Lisp programming, catering to both beginners and experienced programmers by covering the basics and advanced topics.
  • Practical Approach
    It emphasizes practical applications of Lisp, with numerous examples and projects that illustrate real-world usage, making it useful for learning how to write practical and efficient code.
  • Engaging Writing Style
    The author maintains an engaging and accessible writing style that keeps readers interested while explaining complex concepts in an understandable manner.
  • Free Access Online
    The book is available for free online, providing easy access to anyone interested in learning about Common Lisp without financial barriers.

Possible disadvantages of Practical Common Lisp

  • Assumes Prior Programming Knowledge
    The book may assume that readers have some programming background, which might make it challenging for complete beginners to grasp certain concepts quickly.
  • Dated Examples
    Given its publication date, some examples might be somewhat outdated in terms of current technological standards and might not represent the latest best practices in programming.
  • Focus on High-Level Understanding
    While it covers many aspects of Lisp, the book might not delve deeply into certain advanced technical details, which could be a downside for those seeking in-depth technical expertise.
  • Limited Coverage of Modern Libraries
    The book might not address newer libraries and tools that have emerged in the Lisp ecosystem since its publication, potentially missing out on some modern practices.

Steel Bank Common Lisp features and specs

  • Performance
    Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is known for its high-performance execution due to its native code compiler, which optimizes and speeds up Lisp code execution significantly.
  • Standards Compliance
    SBCL is largely standard-compliant with Common Lisp, ensuring that code written for SBCL is portable across other Common Lisp implementations.
  • Actively Maintained
    The project is actively maintained and updated, which means it benefits from regular improvements, bug fixes, and up-to-date features.
  • Robust Debugging Tools
    SBCL offers robust debugging tools and a powerful REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop), which aid developers in interactive programming and troubleshooting.
  • Free and Open Source
    SBCL is open-source and available for free, which allows developers to use, modify, and distribute the software under the terms of the license.

Possible disadvantages of Steel Bank Common Lisp

  • Steep Learning Curve
    For beginners, especially those unfamiliar with Lisp or functional programming paradigms, learning SBCL can be challenging.
  • Platform Dependency
    While SBCL is available on multiple platforms, certain features and optimizations are specific to particular operating systems, which can affect portability.
  • Limited Built-in Libraries
    SBCL does not come with a broad range of built-in libraries compared to some other modern languages, which may require additional effort for library management.
  • Verbose Syntax
    Common Lisp, and by extension SBCL, is known for its verbose syntax, which can be cumbersome compared to newer, more concise programming languages.
  • Community Size
    The SBCL community, while active, is smaller compared to those of other mainstream programming languages, potentially limiting the availability of resources and community support.

Practical Common Lisp videos

Practical Common Lisp

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  • Review - Practical Common Lisp

Steel Bank Common Lisp videos

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Category Popularity

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Education
100 100%
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Programming Language
40 40%
60% 60
OOP
42 42%
58% 58
IDE
0 0%
100% 100

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Practical Common Lisp seems to be a lot more popular than Steel Bank Common Lisp. While we know about 53 links to Practical Common Lisp, we've tracked only 5 mentions of Steel Bank Common Lisp. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Practical Common Lisp mentions (53)

  • Which Lisp? Beginner
    I recommend starting with this free book which covers Common Lisp: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • I Chose Common Lisp
    I began learning Common Lisp (CL) from the Common Lisp HyperSpec (CLHS): https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/Contents.htm When I began learning CL about two decades ago, I did not know of any other source, so CLHS was my only source back then and I think it has served me well. A popular recommendation these days is Practical Common Lisp (by Peter Seibel): https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Holding a Program in One's Head (2007)
    A quote originally (AFAIK) from the wonderful (and free!) book 'Practical Common Lisp'. https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Defense of Lisp Macros
    The Giga Monkeys Book, Practical Common Lisp is also excellent: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • The Loudest Lisp Program
    > So it's really pick your poison; either the child controls the call, at the risk of doing it wrong or not at all, or it doesn't but then certain things become impossible. CL lets you do both in various ways: the typical way to define a constructor is an :AFTER method that just sets the slots (fields in other languages) of the object and having a lot of behavior in constructors is unusual. You can also define an... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
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Steel Bank Common Lisp mentions (5)

  • Not only Clojure โ€“ Chez Scheme: Lisp with native code speed
    Tangential: if we're talking Lisp and native code speed, Steel Bank Common Lisp (by default) compiles everything to machine code. [0] https://sbcl.org. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • A few newbie questions about lisp
    Q5: Get http://sbcl.org/. Install https://quicklisp.org/. SBCL is the implementation that's the lowest friction, and Quicklisp is a package manager that's almost* painless. Source: over 2 years ago
  • [C++20][safety] static_assert is all you need (no leaks, no UB)
    That is what we do in Lisp. Try sbcl if you haven't tried it yet. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Trying to wrap my head around `xbps-src`
    I want to add the sbcl-doc subpackage (the manual for SBCL in GNU Info format), but first I need to understand how to write package definitions. As far as I understand there are the "templates" which are shell scripts that describe how a package is to be built and installed, and xbps-src is a shell script which can process these templates to actually carry out the work. Source: almost 4 years ago
  • Ask HN: Areas in Programming to Avoid
    > Lisp looks like Python, that's far from C, and usually it's a "interpreted" language, far from machine the currently most popular Common Lisp implementation is based around an optimizing native code compiler. That compiler has its roots in the early 80s. See https://sbcl.org . It's far away from being 'interpreted'. - Source: Hacker News / over 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Practical Common Lisp and Steel Bank Common Lisp, you can also consider the following products

Land of Lisp - Learning Resources

Clozure Common Lisp - Clozure CL (often called CCL for short) is a free Common Lisp implementation with a long history.

Racket Lang - Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) is a modern programming language in the Lisp/Scheme family, suitable...

Python - Python is a clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.

On Lisp - Learning Resources

CLISP - CLISP is a portable ANSI Common Lisp implementation and development environment by Bruno Haible.