After spending a (very) long time on the Reference for the SLIME/Lisp/Emacs Screencast and getting lots of good reviews of it, I’ve taken a little pause from writing to actually do some coding! A few months ago, I started going through Practical Common Lisp, but found it too painful to work in Emacs. I believed in Emacs, I just need to invest the time and practice in getting more comfortable with it. The SLIME movie was part of it, and I’ve been working on the Ultimate Noob Emacs/SLIME Cheat Sheet. I’m beta testing it right now and I’ll post it when I feel more comfortable with it. (EDIT: A beta version is up now) I’m going through Practical Common Lisp again and this time it’s much better. I’ve read the book and I’m following along in the Practical chapters, coding alongside the text and testing, running, debugging, etc. Right now I’m a little hung up on the magic of how asdf knows where to find the files. I’ll have some more later this week. Probably a startup or business article – I’ve got a couple ideas ready to burst from my head.

In the meantime, I’ve received some glowing praise. First, my Lisp: The Golden Age… article was nominated for the first ever Battle of the Technorati Challenged, a little contest for excellent writing from little-known bloggers (I certainly qualify there!). I ended up winning, since 6 out of 14 voters chose me! So thanks to Caffeinated Coder for nominating me, and thanks to his dozens of readers for participating in the contest.

Second, I got some nice feedback from some of the people on comp.lang.lisp about the SLIME screencast reference. Here a few of my favorites:

“er, Hip hip hooray? This is my dream come true, fresh blood invigorating the CL landscape. We get a /lot/ of noobs who whine about the tools learning curve, and I understand that it is hard, but I also understand that the situation will not change until folks like you make the climb and before charging off to create the next Viaweb take a moment or week to make things easier for the next bloke.” – Ken Tilton

“Seconded. This is really cool! I hope you’ll stick around a create more resources like this.” – Peter Hildebrandt

“Very impressive! Good work. Next step, make another screencast that add to what Marco covered! 🙂 ” – Andreas Davour

Thanks everyone, I appreciate everyone that has read and commented, and there’s more good stuff to come!