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Common Lisp

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A programmable programming language.
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Track mentors

5 Mentors

Our mentors are friendly, experienced Common Lisp developers who will help teach you new techniques and tricks.
Track students

822 Students

Join hundreds of students who have enjoyed learning and improving their skills by taking this track.
Track exercises

40 Exercises

Hundreds of hours have gone into making these exercises fun, useful, and challenging to help you enjoy learning.

About Common Lisp

(defun distance (str1 str2
                 &key (test #'char=))
  "Number of positional differences in
   two equal length strings."
  (when (= (length str1) (length str2))
    (count nil
           (map 'list test str1 str2))))

Common Lisp is an offshoot of the long-running family of Lisp programming languages. It's a multi-paradigm programming language that allows you to choose the approach and paradigm according to your application domain.

Common Lisp has fast prototyping capabilities, and exceptional support for object oriented programming. It also boasts a macro system which allows you to adapt the language to your needs, and a run-time environment which allows modification of running applications.

To learn more about Common Lisp, take a look at the Common Lisp homepage.

Join the Common Lisp track

Exercism is a great website

The reviews are incredibly helpful because they help me see things that I missed, learn about new ways and sometimes interesting discussions that can add a fun twist to maybe a simple problem.

Bud Chirica, Scotland
Relaxed. Encouraging. Supportive.

Meet the Common Lisp Track mentors

Once you join the Common Lisp language track, you will receive support and feedback from our team of mentors. Here are the bios of a few of the mentors of this track.

Avatar of Brooks J Rady

Brooks J Rady thelostlambda.xyz

A functional programmer who loves Haskell, Lisp, Rust, and Elixir.
Avatar of Tushar Tyagi

Tushar Tyagi https://github.com/tushartyagi

I dabble with Common Lisp and find it interesting because of minimal syntax and the amazing functionalities which the syntax brings.
Avatar of Tim Hawes

Tim Hawes https://github.com/timotheosh

I love Lisp, functional programming, and the nostalgia behind Common Lisp.
Avatar of Mark Simpson

Mark Simpson https://github.com/verdammelt

I have always been interested in Lisps since taking the SICP course in college. I love the expressiveness and conciseness of the simple syntax, and the ability to build the language upward to meet the domain.
Avatar of Pierre Thierry

Pierre Thierry https://github.com/kephas

I fell in love with Common Lisp for its interactivity, metaprogramming and uniform syntax. If I have any say, it's usually my language of choice for both professional and personal projects.
Fun. Challenging. Interesting

Community-sourced Common Lisp exercises

These are a few of the 40 exercises on the Common Lisp track. You can see all the exercises here.

Scrabble Score
easy
control flow loops
games
maps
strings
Difference Of Squares
easy
control flow loops
floating point numbers
integers
math
Strain
easy
control flow conditionals
control flow loops
filtering
sequences
Nucleotide Count
easy
control flow loops
maps
sorting
strings
RNA Transcription
easy
control flow conditionals
strings
transforming
Robot Name
easy
randomness
strings
variables
Passionate. Knowledgeable. Creative.

Meet the Common Lisp Track maintainers

The Common Lisp Maintainers are the brains behind the Common Lisp Track. They spend their spare time creating interesting and challenging exercises that we can all learn from. We are incredibly grateful for their hard work. Here are the bios of a few of the maintainers of this track.

Avatar of Mark Simpson

Mark Simpson Code and Cocktails

I have always been interested in Lisps since taking the SICP course in college. I love the expressiveness and conciseness of the simple syntax, and the ability to build the language upward to meet the domain.

Get started with the Common Lisp track. As with everything on Exercism, it's 100% free!

Join the Common Lisp Track