Everyone, let me celebrate a little bit: I am creating a Common Lisp video course on the Udemy platform. I’m several dozen hours in already and it’s taking a good shape! It is so much more time consuming to create videos than to write a tutorial O_o But I like what’s in there already, although there isn’t everything I want to teach, of course. I’m working on more content. Everything will come in time, and meanwhile you can buy the course: you’ll get future content for “free” ;) Yes the course is to sell, hopefully it will help me concentrate more on my CL activities (BTW, dear reader, here’s a 50% off coupon for April, 2022, and if you are a student drop me a line). Currently 4 videos are freely viewable, and I’m also posting new videos on Youtube (that one is on how to create a new Common Lisp project with my project generator) but more on that later. You currently have more than 3 hours of learning material.

You probably know me from my blog and my Lisp activities. I am vindarel, I contribute to community-based learning resources such as the Cookbook and I use CL in production©. Honestly, I missed a Cookbook-like resource as a beginner. I dumped there a lot of content and must-know tricks that I either learned the hard way, either learned by chance. But I still want Common Lisp to be easier to learn and, for that, there is the video media. Consequently, I truely think this course is today’s most efficient way to learn Common Lisp.

So, what can you learn already in my course?

I want it to be practical: you will learn Lisp the language in order to build real-world stuff.

Udemy

Chapter 1 is how to get started

1.1. We start by installing SBCL on our machine (showed for Unix, links for Windows). This one is 15m long and is 🆓 free to watch. We see how to start our Lisp, how to write “hello world”, we understand the output, we add readline support to the SBCL default REPL in the terminal, we disable the interactive debugger, and we have a few words on Lisp implementations and GNU CLISP in particular.

1.2. We see how to run Lisp code, the simplest way. We write a code snippet with a simple text editor and we run it with sbcl’s --script and --load flags. We use the LOAD function.

1.3. We see how to use Portacle (the ready-to-use, multiplatform image shipping Emacs, SBCL, Quicklisp, Git and a couple handy Emacs packages).

Chapter 2 is about Lisp basics

2.1. I heard Lisp beginners who needed a recap on the Lisp syntax and the evualation model. This one is also 🆓 available to everyone. We see: the prefix notation, that everything is an expression, the evaluation model (and the exception of macros). Code is data is code… right?

2.2. How to define variables, at the toplevel or locally. How to lexically re-bind dynamic variables, the gotcha, the alternative.

2.3. and conditionals (if, when, #+or…)

That’s it for now for this chapter (yes, we’ll see data structures, but for now I refer you to the Cookbook, on the page that I also authored. You are armed to read it.).

Chapter 3 is about iteration. It is made of shorter videos that typically sum up in 5 minutes

…what took me a long time to learn or discover, a way longer time to admit.

3.1 Iterating over lists and vectors (with 🆓 free preview). loop, dolist and other libraries of the ecosystem.

3.2 then: Iterating over a hash-table keys and values. We see 5 different ways in 5 minutes.

3.3 Iterating a fixed or infinite number of times, and we take the opportunity to build our first read-eval-print-loop.

3.4. Here, we take a high level overview of loop and we study some gotchas. We see a practical example from an answer to last year’s Advent Of Code.

Chapter 4 teaches everything you need to know about functions

(with a sneak peak into CLOS):

4.1. How to create named functions, how to handle all types of arguments (🆓 free preview). We see defun, returned values, required arguments, optional arguments, key arguments, how to set a default value, how to know if an argument was supplied, &rest, example of apply, feature flags…

4.2. Referencing functions, redefining functions locally, accessing documentation

4.3. Multiple Return Values (they are NOT like returning a list or a tuple!!!)

4.4. Higher Order Functions: how to give functions as arguments, member, the :test keyword, map and mapcar, lambda, how to generate functions, what are symbols, setf symbol-function. A word on currying and being a Lisp-2.

4.5. Closures

4.6. setf functions

4.7. Generic Functions (quick intro to CLOS): they allow to write functions that dynamically dispatch on the type of their arguments. What we see (quickly): defmethod, defgeneric.

and, lastly (for now):

Chapter 5 shows how to work with projects

5.1 How to work with an existing project. ASDF, Quicklisp, SLIME shortcuts, some useful asdf functions…

5.2. How to create a new project. As a bonus, see again my new video on Youtube: Common Lisp: how to create a new project (demo of my project generator).

5.3. What are systems and packages anyways? Demo. Gotcha when creating a package. Finding all external symbols of a package.

Soooo

Who is this course for by the way?

I must warn that this course is not for total newcomers in programming. You should know what variables and functions are. You should knew that Common Lisp is a language of the Lisp family! (I tell more in the presentation video, but still).

Lisp newbies are welcome because I introduce Lisp basics (syntax, evaluation model) and I show how to install everything. It would help if you know what is a language of the Lisp family.

This course is mainly targetting young(ish) profesional developers like me, who feel they deserve a more fun, comfy, compiled and fast programming language.

It is for Python or JavaScript programmers frustrated by the unstability of their ecosystem,

for students of computer science who want to discover why Lisp still has un-matched alien technology inside (and maybe for *your* students?),

for Clojurists who want to transition quickly to a bare-metal Lisp,

or simply for your friend or colleague to whom you are trying to sell the power of Lisp ;)

Closing thoughts

If you are already a programmer: you can watch the videos at speed 1.25 or higher, but try to not skip content. You can start by the chapter of your choice. Use the captions, they are manually edited.

Thanks kindly for your support in that new journey of mine! Hope you’ll enjoy the content (I know you’ll learn a few tricks).

Learn Common Lisp now! It's a tool for a lifetime.

And have fun!

   🎥   Common Lisp: from novice to effective developer    🎥

  • project’s GitHub
  • a known issue: I started with a meh microphone. I bought a new one, sound is now good, but older videos were not re-captured yet.

ADDENDUM: the Lisp philosophy revealed

Udemy auto-generates captions for your videos. You can manually edit them… but sometimes I was tempted not to, as they can reveal some hidden truth^^

I can see my new prince here

reveals my respect for “print”.

Survivor needs votes.

I never thought about that O_o (that’s for “the variable name is unbound”)

CL might be more active than you think:

Google and China’s also actively contributes, as we said.

for “Google engineers also actively contribute to the SBCL implementation”. My cute accent is well interpreted beyond hopes (and it is not wrong, hello fellow chinese lispers o/ ).

and yes, I use communism prediction.

“I use CL in production”…

Lisp is used in more places than you think:

I want to give you a few tips for when you are dealing with cruise people

aka “for when you are dealing with macros”. And yes:

my crew is special

indeed :p “the loop macro is special”.

We knew a so called Lisp curse… there’s a conspiracy too!

the conspiracy control key

is “C-c C-k”.

and we can create with controversy

instead of “and we can quit with C-c C-c”.

you have to respect the water

you have to respect the order.

discipline is nested in your code.

for “deeply nested in your code”

I’ll show you from Oslo

= “I’ll show you from Emacs and Slime”, that’s quite an interpretation but Emacs is a great place to live in too.

And I also like that one:

I’m actually a terrific

that is the translation of the name “Eitaro Fukamachi”. Add “coder” and that matches :)