Lisp Caveats

Bad practices in Common Lisp world, and how to avoid them.

Greetings

Hello world! My name is Anton Kovalenko, I’m a computer programmer and I use Common Lisp. Currently I maintain a friendly fork of SBCL, which provides multithreading and many other interesting features on Windows platforms.

This place is where I will share my thoughts on Common Lisp programming, concentrating on bashing the programming practices which are bad, but not widely known to be bad: unfortunately, I’ve noticed several things of this kind in existing Common Lisp libraries. I’m thinking of the problems that are easy to fix and easy to avoid, caused by a mere lack of knowledge of some minutae in the behavior of modern OSes, or by an overlooked potential use case.

I reserve the right to add some optimistic content, like a praise for good code, making a good balance together with my complaints about bad practices in other entries.