Common Lisp programming: from novice to effective developer

Learn the Lisp language, the tools and the ecosystem to become a productive and happy programmer.

Common Lisp is an awesome language. It has pioneered a LOT of concepts in computer science, and while old it is still used in the industry by Big Corps (all quantum computing ones, Google) as well as one-person companies (me!). I'll help you learn it efficiently.

UPDATE October, 2025: I finished recording and editing the chapter about DATA STRUCTURES (lists, plists, alists, vectors and arrays, hash-tables, the CONS cell, trees and sets…). I'm putting the last touch and adapting subtitles.

There are subtitles.

I publish complementary videos on Youtube (vindarel channel).

If you subscribe now, you'll get the next chapters at no additional cost.

Lisp the language is different than the Algol/C-like family of languages, and the Lisp development environments still offer unmatched capabilities: interactive, image-based development experience, while getting type warnings and errors at compile time in a fraction of a second, speed in the same group of C, Rust and Java (while sweating less to get to the result), while ensuring stability through decades, etc, etc, etc.

However, you are about to enter a big new world. There are rough edges, the information is sometimes spread apart and hard to discover, despite my continuous work on collaborative resources.

So, I gathered my knowledge and experience of more than seven years of continuous reading, tweaking, writing, asking and answering questions, discovering libraries, trial and error, releasing open-source libraries, starter kits and demo projects, contributing to ambitious projects and running commercial services… into this series of videos.

We will learn the language, the tools, the most important pieces of the ecosystem (a dozen libraries viewed so far), in order to be able to develop a Common Lisp software from the ground up. We will see some theory on what a Lisp language is but, be warned, theory isn't our goal, we'll quickly dive into the Common Lisp way. I will develop with Emacs and Slime (you can use Atom/Pulsar, Vim, VSCode, Sublime, Jetbrains/Intellij, LispWorks, Lem, a Jupyter notebook, CLOG or a simple text editor along with a command line prompt as we see in the first chapter), we will learn the syntax, we will create new projects some scratch, we will see everything about functions and macros, all the iteration constructs, error and condition handling, the CLOS object system (new in 2024) and we will build self-contained binaries.

The Common Lisp Cookbook (which I mainly wrote) is a good companion to this video series.

I am genuinely happy to share all that with you in this new video format and I wish you a fun journey.

PS: pro tip: if you find a video too slow or if you think you know the content, watch it at speed x1.25 or x1.5. However I recommend to not skip content, as I give tips here and there and inside a section we build on the previous video's content.