Interesting! This is precisely what you need to record in the Readme!! "You need asdf 3.1 or higher." I assume you mean 3.1, right? According to http://www.cliki.net/ASDF the current version is 3.1. Is that really such a big difference?
Common Lisp's crap documentation is culturally recursively turtles all the way down, just like all the good things about it.. :/ This is why I'm rooting for you to break out of this cycle of suck and improve things. Would you consider starting with a pristine Ubuntu 14.04 without sbcl or anything on it, and saving all the commands you type in until you get to a working Clamp? That would be wonderful to include in the Readme.
Another option might be to eschew asdf since the default versions on the most common Ubuntu release interact so poorly. Just dump all notion of dependencies and directly include all the code you need in the appropriate relative paths. Give me a single "sbcl --load" command to rule them all, just like Arc 3.1's classic "racket -f as.scm".
(It's not just Common Lisp, by the way. I have yet to meet a language-specific package manager that didn't suck. Pip, RubyGems, CPAN, it's all utter garbage. NPM hasn't started to suck yet, but I'm constantly looking for signs of incipient over-complexification.)
Edit: I'd be happy to provide a temporary Ubuntu server on Linode or something for this work.
No. It's just that asdf >=3.1.2 will check the ~/common-lisp directory by default. Prior to 3.1.2, you had to manually specify the directories you wanted asdf to check.
It looks like the version of sbcl you are using is old enough that the asdf version it comes with is older than 3.1.2. From that link, there is https://common-lisp.net/project/asdf/asdf.lisp Copy paste that into a file and add `(load "/foo/bar/asdf.lisp")` to your .sbclrc. I believe that Quicklisp comes with a more recent version of asdf, so you can also try setting that up and seeing if that configures asdf properly.
> I also tried various incantations from these tabs I have open
asdf-install was the previous version of Quicklisp, but you should now be using Quicklisp instead.
I should spend the time to make Clamp a Quicklisp package so that you would be able to install it with just `(ql:quickload :clamp)` instead of needing to deal with asdf.
Woohoo! I'll send you a pull request. Is there some way we can provide an "Arc repl" that's already in the right package and uses the right syntax? I tried this, but it didn't work:
Reader macros work on a per file basis so I don't think there is a way to set the proper syntax from a separate file.
You might want to consider trying to setup Slime, as it provides some really amazing Smalltalk-esque features. I detailed most of them in my blog series, Debugging Lisp[0]. Some of the ones I covered in the post are: recompilation of code at runtime, restarting of a stack frame at runtime, an object inspector, interactive restarts (restarts are a better form of try/catch), various forms of function lookup (e.g. list all functions who call function X). I haven't yet covered it, but I eventually want to, is slime-macrostep[1]. It lets you interactively expand parts of a macro step by step.
I've gotten Slime working, but so far I'm still doing the same things I would do in an interactive session:
$ emacs
M-x slime RET
# in the slime buffer
* (ql:quickload :clamp)
* (in-package :clamp)
* (use-syntax :clamp)
Is that what do you typically do?
Also, when I try to C-x C-e an arc expression in some random buffer after the above steps, it doesn't seem to remember the above commands anymore. The only thing that works is running commands at the repl.
and then whenever you open a file that ends in .lisp, it will enable slime-mode.
If you are going to get into programming Lisp with Emacs, you should look into Evil (vim bindings for Emacs), paredit (smart paren editing), ac-slime (autocomplete for slime), show-paren-mode (shows matching parens), and undo-tree (a better version of undo/redo). Although I've never used it, you might want to look at Spacemacs which is supposed to supply sane defaults for Emacs.
>If you are going to get into programming Lisp with Emacs, you should look into Evil (vim bindings for Emacs), paredit (smart paren editing), ac-slime (autocomplete for slime), show-paren-mode (shows matching parens), and undo-tree (a better version of undo/redo).
Yes, customizing Emacs is really useful for making it better to use. To help with that, here are some of my config's settings for things you've mentioned. My show-paren-mode settings are here (https://bitbucket.org/zck/.emacs.d/src/default/init.el?filev...).
Instead of paredit, I use smartparens. They do similar things, but when I looked at the two, I thought smartparens was better, although I can't remember why right now. My config is here (https://bitbucket.org/zck/.emacs.d/src/default/init.el?filev...).
I should similarly check out the other things you've mentioned (except Evil, 'cause I don't like modal editing).
