PicoLisp at first glance
As I announced earlier, the plan was to create some small proof of concept web-thing in c-lisp but it didn’t work out. Instead I ended up doing just that in PicoLisp instead, I guess me and c-lisp was not meant to be. Anyway, Pico is created by Alex Burger without whose help and patience I wouldn’t have gone very far.
Actually at first Pico seemed too good to be true, just a few things:
– Good documentation (rare in the Lisp world).
– Object persistence/database.
– Totally dynamically interpreted (no need for macros).
– UTF-8 support out of the box.
– Built in webserver.
– GUI framework to render HTML.
– Mailing function with attachments (SMTP).
– File uploads.
OK so maybe it was a little too good to be true, the documentation is good but covers far from everything, and the reference is what it is, a reference for people who already know the language to some extent. The GUI framework is tailored to Alex’s work which is administrative programs for big corporations which differs from what we do here. Most of the stuff you might want to change is made in Pico though so it won’t be very hard to change, no need to touch C. As far as the documentation goes; I will try and remedy the situation somewhat in the near future, the more I learn the more I can teach.
For some time now I’ve struggled with Pico and it gets easier every day, my C-mind is slowly expanding. It has been painful, and still is, but it is worth it 🙂
So having said the above I could go directly to fast-explaining what I’ve done so far which is ye old registration form. Just like I do with my PHP stuff. That would, understandably, be totally useless since we’re talking about a language with an extremely small adoption, even counting all the people who are fluent in other Lisps.
This will instead be a new series for absolute Pico beginners, just like I was. I will contrast PicoLisp against PHP in the examples to make it easier for c-people to understand. At the end of this series will be the explanation of how the registration form works, hopefully by then it will be easily understood.
Disclaimer: This series will only be about PicoLisp, the content in the tutorials might or might not be applicable to other Lisps.