ALU: Common Lisp FAQ

Common Lisp FAQ

Champion

Team Members

Larry Clapp

Justin Heyes-Jones

John Deszyck

Proposal

With the recent resurgence of interest in Common Lisp it seems like the time is ripe to update the Lisp FAQ. It certainly doesn't help Lisp's image that the top hit when Googling for "lisp faq" is the old comp.lang.lisp FAQ that hasn't been updated in nearly a decade. (A fine FAQ for its time, but showing its age.) We are also aware of the common-lisp.net project to produce an updated FAQ but it seems to have languished after an initial burst of activity.

Here's the plan. We've created a mailing list, cl-faq (at) lispniks.com, for discussing questions and answers that folks think should be part of a new Common Lisp FAQ. Peter Seibel has volunteered to act as the FAQ editor until such time as he is deposed or chooses a successor. He will be responsible for the overall tone and organization of the FAQ and will publish new versions from time to time at http://www.lispniks.com/faq/faq.html.

How to Contribute

Anyone can contribute by sending questions or answers they think should be part of a new Common Lisp FAQ to peter (at) gigamonkeys.com. (Due to the spam problem, posting to the list itself is limited to subscribers.)

Right now we are working on gathering questions with and without answers and trying to put them into some kind of organization. For the moment we are gathering unedited questions and answers into a staging document which is avaialable at http://www.lispniks.com/faq/staging-faq.html. We have also been fortunate enough to have been given permission to adapt material from both the earlier Lisp faqs and have converted them to Gigamonkeys Markup for easier incorporation into our FAQ. The converted versions are available at http://www.lispniks.com/faq/comp.lang.lisp-faq.html and http://www.lispniks.com/faq/lispfaq.html.

If you want to participate in and/or observe the discussion of the FAQ questions and answers, you can subscribe to cl-faq at:

http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/cl-faq

The list archive is available at:

http://www.lispniks.com/pipermail/cl-faq/

You can also get the source code of the FAQ (including the Lisp code used to produce the web version) from the Google hosted project at:

http://code.google.com/p/lispfaq/

Goal

Googling for "Lisp FAQ" should produce our new FAQ as the #1 result. This goal implies that our FAQ is actually useful to new Lispers since it's unlikely that we'll be able to get the necessary Google juice unless folks actually find it worth linking to.

Milestones