frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language

https://www.vivienhenz.com/common-lisp
31•misterchocolat•1h ago

Comments

misterchocolat•1h ago
Happy to discuss
sroerick•28m ago
I was just explaining this exact thing to somebody a couple days ago - even used ERP as the example. Hear hear, sir
frollogaston•25m ago

  Also, in most languages an error will crash your program. So if you’re writing code with an LLM it will have to read your crash logs to make some changes and run your program again. In Common Lisp your program won’t crash, it’ll stop and open a debugger with the whole stack and all the variables. You can just point your LLM at the debugger, and it’ll make its fix and resume the program.
What does this look like in a real example system that you're maintaining? I can't imagine you'd always be able to resume like that if it's something like a webserver.

Where I'm coming from: I have never used Common Lisp, closest was Erlang for a ~3 year project. I understood the appeal of functional programming, just didn't like it. It was also hard to find support and libraries for that less common language.

darkwi11ow•19m ago
You can do this in many other interpreted languages like Python interpreter when running with --pdb flag will do the same. I imagine CL does this by default when running code in interpreted mode and omits the behaviour for compiled (production) binaries.
ellg•28m ago
cant you do most of this with smalltalk too, or erlang?

I dont really understand what macros get you when llms exist since a llm doesnt really need to create dsls to get work done

misterchocolat•24m ago
sure I agree the LLM doesn't need a DSL to get work done. The point is more that the DSL holds the opinions of whoever built the product
UncleOxidant•22m ago
I think what they're saying is that in CL you create DSLs that are tailored for the domain and that will result in lower token use. Not sure about that claim, would like to see some data to backup that assertion. Wouldn't you then need to supply the LLM with a "programming manual" for this new DSL? Wouldn't that cost tokens?
jaggederest•18m ago
Smalltalk, in image based systems, absolutely. Erlang not as much, it's more of a "crash the actor and try again" than "rewind, pause, and handle errors in-system"
VikramBhamre•27m ago
I mean its cool but what about all of the extra infra I need to write because support for the lang is not as extensive and so more code I need to maintain?
mstep•25m ago
related: https://opusmodus.com/forums/blogs/entry/4-connecting-an-ai-...
giancarlostoro•21m ago
> In Common Lisp your program won’t crash, it’ll stop and open a debugger with the whole stack and all the variables. You can just point your LLM at the debugger, and it’ll make its fix and resume the program.

> To my knowledge Common Lisp is the only mainstream language that does all of this.

Sounds like someone who has never used C# and Visual Studio? Even JavaScript is capable of doing this, honestly JavaScript might be the one language with the richest developer tooling of all time (possibly?), sad to say because there's nicer to work with languages out there.

frollogaston•20m ago
IF you're running a debug build. I guess Common Lisp can do this in prod?
jaggederest•16m ago
I've had some of the same ideas, I would love a full macro system on a dependently typed language. My stab at it earlier in January was not quite the right thing, but I do think this is the way. Weirdly enough concision is even more important in LLM context than in regular human context.
ltbarcly3•14m ago
Common Lisp isn't even a good programming language. There's nothing in CL that isn't in a ton of other languages now. When it was being designed it was way ahead, but now it's just way behind.

Maybe you could take CL as a foundation, introduce modern features and uniformity to the language, remove some of the insane complexity, tame the unhygienic macros, and come up with a pretty good language. Since about 7392 different flavors of scheme have tried to do this and mostly failed, I think this is very unlikely.

gorgoiler•6m ago
[delayed]

Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language

https://www.vivienhenz.com/common-lisp
36•misterchocolat•1h ago•30 comments

Beam: Reflection's 501B open-weight model

https://reflection.ai/blog/introducing-beam
371•Philpax•9h ago•111 comments

Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades

https://www.debugbear.com/blog/example-dot-com-redesign-history
130•jgx0•5h ago•77 comments

Find the flattest route between any two points in SF

https://flattensf.com/
143•ishan0102•7h ago•48 comments

Dust: Pretraining Transformers Without Backpropagation

https://qlabs.sh/research/dust
137•E-Reverance•7h ago•30 comments

Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates

https://www.vals.ai/blogs/room-temperature-magnetic-semiconductors
260•outlier99•7h ago•180 comments

An algorithmic failure beneath the secret ballot

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/08/03/an-algorithmic-failure-beneath-the-secret-ballot/
52•leecoursey•2d ago•15 comments

Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend

https://dbushell.com/2026/10/03/deno-to-node/
101•ibobev•6h ago•42 comments

AI tutoring with Khanmigo in a two-year school experiment

https://edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1551
53•bryan0•4h ago•38 comments

Show HN: Photoc – Command-line tools for photographers

https://github.com/ahmetomerv/photoc
13•ahmetomer•2d ago•2 comments

Web Search API

https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-10-02-introducing-web-search-api/
506•tosh•17h ago•234 comments

ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/chatgpt-is-adding-real-cartoonists-signatures-to-fake-new-yorke...
346•rdmuser•5h ago•254 comments

Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge

https://www.techspot.com/news/114091-florida-woman-used-claude-diary-anthropic-reported-shoot.html
626•emptybits•23h ago•500 comments

Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2018) [pdf]

https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf
150•vinhnx•2d ago•35 comments

Global Solar Atlas: summary of solar power potential globally

https://globalsolaratlas.info/
33•stratts•6h ago•16 comments

Samon: Designing a Zen Garden Raking Puzzle

https://gwern.net/doc/design/2026-10-03-gwern-samon.html
28•networked•5h ago•10 comments

Testing 12 different Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors

https://smarthomescene.com/reviews/best-selling-zigbee-temperature-sensors-tested/
63•walrus01•2d ago•14 comments

Resurrecting iChat Audio and Video Conferencing

https://blog.pipetogrep.org/2026/09/11/resurrecting-ichat-audio-and-video-conferencing/
7•thepipetogrep•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Entombed in a Raycaster

https://www.stelabouras.com/blog/entombed-raycaster/
5•stelabouras•2d ago•0 comments

DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit

https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda
41•greyface-•1d ago•4 comments

Ephemeral Testing

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/10/05/ephemeral-testing/
40•ibobev•5h ago•13 comments

Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/texas-city-demands-2m-for-public-records-on-flock-usage/
146•01-_-•6h ago•24 comments

High Diesel Prices Bankrupted 16 Trucking Companies in Just 30 Days

https://www.thedrive.com/news/high-diesel-prices-bankrupted-16-trucking-companies-in-just-30-days
82•speckx•4h ago•54 comments

Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1

https://floreal.tech/blog/2026/making-a-gtk-app-in-haskell-part-1/
144•Vosporos•14h ago•37 comments

The lamps in my house

https://arslan.io/2026/10/05/the-lamps-in-my-house/
158•farslan•14h ago•75 comments

Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project

https://github.com/eolix/photosuite/issues/77
77•montag•4h ago•40 comments

Apple and a hacker's future

https://stratechery.com/2026/apple-and-a-hackers-future/
231•maguay•18h ago•202 comments

Using Theme park rides and smartphones for demonstrating Newtonian mechanics

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6404/aea271
5•bryanrasmussen•2d ago•1 comments

Using Blu-ray M-Disk as backup of last resort

https://smyck.net/2026/10/03/holocron-the-backup-of-last-resort/
81•hukl•1d ago•80 comments

Qualcomm licenses patents on Huawei’s LogicFolding chip tech

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-05/qualcomm-licenses-patents-on-huawei-s-logicfol...
182•0xedb•20h ago•122 comments