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Web Development in Emacs, Common Lisp and Clojurescript - Emacs SG

Engineers.SG
Talks
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this talk2 months2018–2022 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters point to it as a live demonstration of interactive Lisp development, including compiling single functions in a running program and debugger-driven workflows.

Elias Martenson presents his Emacs-based workflow for building a web application (the Potato chat platform) with Common Lisp on the backend and ClojureScript on the frontend. He demonstrates SLIME, Paredit, CIDER and debugger-driven interactive development. The talk is 79 minutes and was given at Emacs SG.

“This video also has great examples of other crazy interactive development workflows and is worth watching in its entirety” (HN, 2021)

2 recommendations · 3 citations · Talks · intermediate

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@grovehaw Mar 2018 Recommends
on HN thread Portacle – A Portable Common Lisp Development Environment
The Potato open source chat platform has a Common Lisp backend and a Clojurescript frontend. There is a fascinating talk by one of the authors on Youtube [0], and the code is on github [1]. A relatively new Web Application Environment called Radiance may also be worth looking at.[2] [0] [this video] [1] [link] [2] [link]
Talk by an author of the Potato chat platform (Lisp backend, Clojurescript frontend).
@tgbugs Aug 2021 Recommends
on HN thread Hell Is Other REPLs
Read more
The workflow for slime/sly and swank/slynk described at the end of the article is standard if you are in the Emacs world. Sometimes I work in an Org file, sometimes in a lisp file directly. In both cases I will C-x C-e (eval-last-sexp) or run blocks, or the whole file (depending on Org vs lisp file). It is copy and paste on steroids (same for slime-eval-defun were you can be working deep inside some large function and update the whole without changing your view). There are some examples of developing in the debugger in [0] around 55 minutes (linked). This video also has great examples of other crazy interactive development workflows and is worth watching in its entirety if you are interested in this kind of thing. 0. [this video]
Shows interactive development workflows including debugger-driven development, worth watching in full.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@lokedhs Jan 2020 Cites it
on HN thread PHP in 2020
I've used Common Lisp for this purpose. You get instant results without even having to reload. You can simply compile a single function while the code is running. I did a talk about this a few years back: [this video]
Commenter's own talk on interactive Common Lisp web development.
@lokedhs Apr 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Common Lisp Resources
A few years back I did a presentation on this very topic. Some people have said they appreciated it so I'm sharing a link here in the hope someone find it useful: [this video]
Commenter shares their own presentation on Common Lisp development.
@lokedhs Oct 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Stop Writing Dead Programs [video]
The sound in this video is pretty bad, but several years ago I did a talk showing how this development style work on a real project, and I think it may answer some of these questions. [this video]
Commenter's talk showing interactive development on a real project; audio is poor.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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