Pulling in some open source common lisp source trees. Not sure whether windows or linux is a better target but for now I’m mostly running windows so I’ll start there.

Quite a few options to choose from. I’ll probably poke at a few of them before I’m done. Currently seems to break out between:

• Common Lisp running on various back-ends. Attractive because this seems to be the most ‘mainstream lisp’ style. Seems to be sort of a super-set of everything that has gone into the list world pretty much ever.
• Clojure as a JVM based, functional programming oriented version of the language. Seems to be well supported and popular but I suspect that it has diverged significantly from its lisp origins. This was more attractive when I was working fro Amazon Robotics and everything I was doing professionally ran on the JVM. Still a nice language package…
• Scheme appears to have been the first consistently lexically scoped lisp implementation. It seems to be in the process of forking into a slim, simple version channeling its roots as a teaching language and a bulkier but more capable language aiming more at the place the common lisps play.

I expect that these will keep me occupied through the end of the weekend (partly putting off diving deep into formally writing the DDL for my sandbox project’s schema) and perhaps even have one or two environments up and running.

One thing that I’m wondering about is the suggestion I’ve seen in several sites that common lisp code gets distributed as a ‘live’ workspace. I’ve become very used to the idea that there is a source code set that builds any particular version of the code being put together. I expect to have a bit of a struggle if lisp means adapting to a world where you can’t exactly rebuild your workspace from source without significant effort. More playing with these languages should tell me whether this impression is accurate.