As I mentioned the other day, I haven’t been using Common Lisp much lately so I was a little rusty when I wrote my A Palindrome Predicate Coda post. It’s not that I forgot the Lisp itself, that’s sufficiently like Elisp, which I use all the time, that it’s easy to move between them. The problem is all the machinery you need to start a Common Lisp project: inscrutable things like ASDF and all that goes with it. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s just fussy and easy to forget the details if you don’t use it all the time.
As far as ASDF and dealing with libraries goes, Zach Beane’s Quicklisp goes a long way towards hiding all the complexity. If you’re writing in Common Lisp and not using Quicklisp, you’re working too hard. Beane has another package, Quickproject, that takes care of getting a Lisp project started by providing a template for the project. It’s also very nice and I use it whenever I’m starting a new CL project.
Baggers (Chris Bagley) has an excellent short video on using Quickproject to start a new project. The video is from 2013 but it’s still accurate and useful. Baggers walks you through loading Quickproject—with Quicklisp, of course—if you don’t already have it loaded and then making a trivial project. He also shows one of his real projects so you can see a more complex example.
The video is only 6 minutes, 37 seconds so it’s easy to find time for it. If, like me, you haven’t been using Common Lisp regularly and need a refresher on getting started, it’s 6 and a half minutes well spent.