Comment by lispm

> Many thanks for taking the time to show those features off, it's very kind of you and I genuinely appreciate it.

:-)

> was also quite impressed with SBCL for catching function calls passing unknown keys at compile time, before the call is invoked.

Generally CL compilers tend to check argument lists at compile time. Number of args, correct keyword arguments, ...

SBCL is especially good, due to its further support of declarations as assertions and its support for various compile time checks. You'll also get Lisp backtraces in a natively compiled Lisp then as a bonus. Also for newcomers it is quite helpful, because SBCL gives a lot of warnings and other feedback for various possible problems (from undeclared identifiers, unused variables up to missing optimization opportunities).

> Perhaps the fact that many Lisp guides feel compelled to start with a terse implementation of lambda calculus might actually be somewhat of a disservice, in hiding the more practical side of the language?

That's true. Lisp was often used in education as a vehicle to learn things like lambda calculus (or similar). Practical programming or "software engineering" with Lisp wasn't part of those courses.

There are books which cover those topics, too. Like "Practical Common Lisp" by Peter Seibel, "Paradigms of AI Programming" from Peter Norvig or "Common Lisp Recipes" by Edi Weitz.

For SBCL one definitely needs to read the manual to get an idea about its extended features.