LISP

Building a Simple Calculator in LISP

A hands-on walkthrough of building a working arithmetic expression calculator in Common Lisp, from tokenizing input to evaluating nested expressions.

Closures in LISP

How LISP closures bundle a function with its lexical environment to create private, persistent state, and common patterns and pitfalls that follow from it.

Conditionals in LISP

Master LISP's conditional forms — if, cond, when, unless, and case — for controlling program flow based on tested conditions.

Defining Functions in LISP

Learn how to define named functions in LISP using defun, understand parameter lists, return values, and documentation strings.

File I/O in LISP

How Common Lisp reads and writes files using streams, with-open-file, and reader/printer control for both text and binary data.

Installing Common Lisp and the REPL

A practical guide to installing the SBCL Common Lisp implementation and getting comfortable working in the interactive REPL.

LISP Atoms and Data Types

A tour of LISP's core data types, numbers, symbols, strings, characters, and booleans, and how lists combine them into compound structures.

LISP Best Practices

Practical conventions for writing clean, maintainable LISP code, covering naming, recursion style, macro hygiene, and error handling.

LISP for AI and Symbolic Computing

Why LISP became the historical language of AI research, and how homoiconicity, symbolic data, and macros support symbolic reasoning, search, and rule-based sys…

LISP Interview Questions

Common LISP interview topics—from car/cdr fundamentals to macros and tail recursion—explained with the reasoning an interviewer expects.

LISP Quick Reference

A condensed cheat sheet of core LISP syntax, data structures, and special forms for Common Lisp, covering the operations used daily.

LISP Syntax and S-Expressions

How LISP's prefix-notation S-expressions work, the difference between atoms and lists, and how quoting controls evaluation.

LISP vs Modern Languages

A comparison of LISP's core design choices—homoiconicity, macros, and minimal syntax—against mainstream languages like Python, JavaScript, and Java.

Macros in LISP

How LISP macros transform unevaluated code at compile time to create new syntax, and how to write them safely with defmacro, gensym, and hygiene practices.

quote and quasiquote

How LISP's quote, quasiquote, unquote, and unquote-splicing let you treat code as inert data and selectively rebuild it as templates.

Recursion in LISP

Understand how recursion works in LISP, including base cases, recursive list processing, and tail-call optimization.

Scheme vs Common Lisp

The core philosophical and technical differences between Scheme's minimalist design and Common Lisp's large, industrial standard.

Vectors and Hash Tables in LISP

When to reach for vectors and hash tables instead of lists — constant-time indexed and keyed access versus linked-chain traversal.

What Is LISP?

An introduction to LISP, one of the oldest programming languages still in use, its list-based syntax, and why it still shapes modern programming.

Your First LISP Program

Write, save, and run a complete Common Lisp program: defining functions with defun, printing output, and loading a source file.

Clojure vs Common Lisp

A practical comparison of Clojure and Common Lisp covering data structures, the JVM host, macros, object systems, and concurrency, for programmers deciding bet…

What Is Clojure?

An introduction to Clojure — a modern, functional Lisp dialect that runs on the JVM and emphasizes immutability and simplicity.