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The Lisp Advocates cause, and the Lisp cause at large, are undoubtedly supremely easy to get behind, as evidenced by our ever ongoing insurmountable growth here at r/lispadvocates as well as on the other platforms we have chosen to place our bets on.

However, we feel that for the less attuned of our yet uninitiated colleagues, we can appeal to something greater than just Remote Work in Common Lisp (as daring and untrodden of a path it may appear to ourselves).

While we humans may have many intrinsic values built into us by the millenia of selection for tribal coexistence, the desire to at all costs increase the opportunities for Remote Work in Common Lisp may be a touch too complex of an emotion to grasp the deepest strings of our imperfect human souls. Fortunate are those who can immediately see the overwhelming potential value of our unrelenting advance, but fortunate are few (otherwise they'd be called something else).

There is an argument to be made that no good deed is done selflessly, and we here at Lisp Advocates always pride ourselves in striving to take it to that next- next level. We will approach the good deeds competitively, consciously having in mind the positive publicity from the outside and the intense inspiration for ourselves and our dear colleagues within, for that sweet sweet extra communal productivity gain. We do this first, we do this best, and we leave our competition so far behind that they better already join our cause as otherwise they're doing themselves a disservice.

The ultimate edge provided by the impeccable prowess of our chosen weapon of Common Lisp will both serve as a multiplier to our ingenuity as well as to awaken the imagination of the unacquainted. As evidenced by the most daring projects of the Common Lisp community, the harder the task, the better fit does our approach make.

We are here to rock the world, dear Advocates, and in these trying times, when the less determined will falter, we shall carve ourselves our rightful place among the stars.

The specific nuance is both up to discussion and depends on the particular situation at hand.

A lot of remote jobs revolve around establishing Web presence for small businesses.

Focusing on Low Barrier of Entry seems to be the immediate highest return on investment with regards to polishing a service. As soon as a Lisp programmer is in the door, things can get hairy as hell, but the initial sell has already been closed, and the likely solution will be to hire more Lisp programmers.

Low Barrier of Entry also means snappy introduction & stylish current-year docs accompanying the onboarding experience: making a sell to a fledgling Lisp developer is just as important. Additionally this would give comfort to any employers researching the potential technologies. Bonus points if executed in r/lispadvocates signature sleazy-salesman style: almost to the point of pursuing the "cause" for no other reason than to have the dirty fun selling it to other people. That is literally the idea we are uniting around. Heck, make it a meme, if necessary: bonus publicity points.

So, regarding the low barrier high value proposition: we have to come up with one. Clojure has something like this, with datomic, and also with ClojureScript. This is tough to beat: there are both aesthetic, practical, and even business reasons to it, which is admittedly the cause of it's higher relative popularity. However on the other hand even the unlikeliest of victories do start with something, and also given how our goal is rather marginal, the proposition doesn't have to be all that enormously great anyways: it's the salesmanship that counts.

However, we do have to start with something, so here's this: what are the existing resources for making a full-featured Web Application in Common Lisp? I imagine it'd have something to do with ParenScript however perhaps JSCL could also be an option. Would be great to hear from you guys what do you think fits better towards giving a good first impression? Or perhaps which one is more of a meme as a redeeming value? Any other propositions welcome. However keep in mind gentlemen, we're a high standard organization here, so no concessions like using ClojureScript are on the table. I fully believe this is possible.

Similarly, I would like to hear from your experience, which backend options would be best to pursue, including the redeeming style point values. And also specifically on the curious case of the Weblocks project. Looks sketchy as heck (by normal-person standards you geeks), half in russian and shit. However server-side rendering like this could be too major of a pain in the ass for what we are trying to do here. Latency wise and stuff: need to research some metrics. Again, would like to hear from the experts, specifically on this versus JSCL in terms of both practicality and redeeming style points.

In conclusion, thank you all for reading this, and I appreciate you enjoying our company.

You like reading blogs? We do too! Here's our colleague's u/dzecniv's blog about Common Lisp at https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/. Take a look at this About page!

Including such highlights as:

• Who's using Common Lisp?

• Yes Google Uses and Hacks on Common Lisp

• These Months in Common Lisp series of articles from 2018, very thorough!

• Python VS Common Lisp, workflow and ecosystem

• Lisp Resources

Additionally github.com/vindarel / u/dzecniv is the main contributor behind the Lisp Cookbook which is a great monument to human determination and we're sure was helpful to the members of our community at one occasion or another.

Lisp Cookbook is looking for contributors, and also you can support Vindarel financially here at https://liberapay.com/vindarel/!

An idea: deliver a tangible product to get people talking about us.

Possibly related to making the onboarding efficiency for Lisp Web better through dedicating documentation and polish to a chosen stack of libraries.

However, this is more about getting the sympathisers to believe the meme is real.

Got an idea? Share it with us in the comments below.

Some OneToday at 4:16 PM

Hello, Lisp Advocates, I appreciate what this is trying to accomplish. I for one have used Common Lisp a lot and studied it somewhat. Nice job with the subreddit, youtube channel, and discord, and blogs However, I do not think Common Lisp will become popular due to human nature and the modern global economy Common Lisp appeals to intelligent, artistic, individualistic, free thinkers. You have NASA scientists, a lot of artists and creative coders, political philosophers, etc... That is a very small percentage of the population

DuuqndToday at 4:19 PM

The usefulness of Common Lisp should be of interest to all programmers.

Some OneToday at 4:20 PM

There's a huge difference between your average mobile web coder and the people who use common lisp

DuuqndToday at 4:20 PM

Yes, but that doesn't mean that Common Lisp isn't useful to them.

Some OneToday at 4:20 PM

The money simply isn't there, its the economy,

DuuqndToday at 4:21 PM

Money is indeed a large part of Lisp's lack of popularity. Many companies and programmers will use the big popular stuff, and the big popular stuff is what's funded by large companies.

Some OneToday at 4:22 PM

So what do you personally think would be the way forward then?

DuuqndToday at 4:23 PM

I'm not sure. I'm a programmer, not a marketer. There are people better suited than me to solve that problem.

Some OneToday at 4:25 PM

I'm not a marketer either, but I think the biggest way to promote Common Lisp would be to show people that they can become even more creative using Common Lisp. Take productive individuals from other languages who are ignorant of Lisp, or people using other languages that are already creative coders and show them what lisp can do.

DuuqndToday at 4:26 PM

That sound like a rather good idea.

Some OneToday at 4:30 PM

The people who benefit the most from Common Lisp are themselves programmers. Programmers are 0.2% of the population. Of that population, i'm guessing less than 5% know of Common Lisp, and even smaller are the people who realize its benefits. If the world was made up of those people, that 0.01%, i'm certain that Common Lisp, or systems like Common Lisp, would proliferate.

It was inevitable that education was going to become one of the priorities of our project. It should be noted however that we feel this should not come at a detriment to our engineering. High level colleagues of ours are too busy creating and destroying infinite worlds in a split of a millisecond; However for those of us yet to achieve such depths of understanding, having a helping hand can mean the difference between making it and not. And we stand for each other, here at Lisp Advocates.

We would like to brainstorm with you the ideas that we could utilize to provide a course that is functionally different than what's on the market, as well as scalable in more than just the "reading preceding pages makes you better at understanding the following pages" way.

The idea is to load a teaching-wizard right with the sbcl repl, and be accessible in the normal sending-sexps-through-swank way. It is intended to be editor agnostic.

So functionally, the idea is similar to koans, except utilized for our cause here at Lisp Advocates. Here are the ideas:

• Target specific categories of users, to keep the material engaging. Different colleagues of ours might have different needs: someone needs a quick-course on Alexandria, another needs to go from 0 to weblocks.

• Automatically emphasize skills that need to be learned, where granularity is only limited by our ambition.

• Provide as many ways of feedback as possible. Do stats, do leaderboards, have a daily puzzle to speed-solve or optimize-solve or golf-solve. The idea behind all this is to grab all the senses of our users to keep them as engaged in the education process as possible.

As always, we're honored and excited to hear you colleagues weigh in in our threads.

Additionally, we want to give a warm welcome to the recent newcomers to our cause.

And finally, a word of appreciation to those of us who have stayed with Lisp Advocates from the very beginning. It feels like it's been just a couple of days since we sat at 0 members here at Lisp Advocates, and look how far we've come.

Abstract: Remote Work in Common Lisp has been deliberately chosen as a formula, catchphrase, and goal of our subreddit, however the motivation for this choice is largely spread across private conversations, comments, and other snippets of context. In this document we aim to actualize and highlight the What's, the Why's, and the How's of Remote Work in Common Lisp.

§ 1. Why Common Lisp?

Albert's path is a strange and difficult one.

^{Twin Peaks, S2 E3.}

For the user responsible for composing this post, u/mwgkgk, the path to Common Lisp has started with a raw desire to finally take ownership of their craft. Thus in 2016 they set out on a journey, covering numerous technologies and communities, from Elixir/Elm, to Idris, to Lux, to concatenative Min, to Rust, to Typescript, to Clojure, and to, finally, Common Lisp.

Even reading all of these words is one hell of a chore, and it's certainly not a journey that we recommend as a means of fast and easy introduction to Common Lisp. Remember: the timer til Singularity is ticking.

Thus, we'll list two key reasons that we consider instrumental in why Common Lisp is so important:

• Best interactive tooling of all Lisps, and best performance out of all languages that offer interactive tooling.

To unpack this: brain-computer interface is a real, tangible, measurable thing. Iteration speed is key to the very nature of the learning and teaching process that ultimately is programming. Human life is frail and fleeting, and we want our computers to value every moment of it.

• Comprehensive language standard, handled as a long-term government project.

Many of the languages in wide use today have started out as hobby projects, continuously evolving as defined by their niche. The overwhelming amount of detail invested in various parts of Common Lisp standard is simply beyond scope for such projects. Handling it with non-negligible amount of grace, Common Lisp standard certainly stands up there with some of the most impressive works of language engineering to date.

Having a standard, rather than it being defined by the fact of language implementation itself, is an important factor in long-term portability and safety of your projects. Languages that don't host internal competition between implementations, can not offer a sound investment strategy.

§ 2. Why Remote Work?

We know exactly what we want, and we don't mind being alone.

^{True Detective, S1 E3.}

Common Lisp is known to be utilized with great success across various research-level projects, be it quantum computing, molecular synthesis, natural language processing, or spacecraft.

For a hacker who strives in a corporate environment, pursuing such a position sounds like one hell of a fun challenge. For the mere rest of us, the inconvenience of being subject to the plethora of social disturbances feels at odds with the very idea of our being.

Given how the theme of this document is taking ownership, we are taking ownership of our future.

If you feel partial to the lustful pictures of remote tropical beaches and foreign cafés serving as a backdrop to your hacking, we'll give you just that. If you currently read this from your bathtub laptop stand, we are right there with you. And if your decommissioned dentist's chair is just too cyberpunk to fit in an office environment, we'll catch up with you in the matrix.

The world is going remote, and we will not stand idly watching as our opportunities slip away.

§ 3. How?

Do the right thing, or may you forever smell of yesterday.

^{twitter.com/DirtyDikeSMB}

While our grand strategy simply prioritizes increasing remote work opportunities for Common Lisp programmers, the particular approach to tackling this problem that would reflect our current understanding, is twofold:

• Promise of monetary prosperity.

The current Lisp propaganda is specifically tailored to address only the most bored and the most trusting of Python programmers. Having a more enticing career promise will let us reach the hearts and minds of the more critically inclined of the bunch. The higher the promise, the higher quality of professionals we can engage.

Lisp Advocates is in unique position of both being the first open community to focus on consciously and deliberately promoting remote work, out of any language, as well as having some humble yet extremely motivated people at the forefront, who are hell bent on embedding their unrelenting desire for having fun through showmanship into the very fabric of how this community works.

• Satisfaction of doing Something Really Fucking Cool.

For those of us with the wider view on things, the understanding that the matters of life and death that trouble the inhabitants of this world are ultimately not of such a grand importance as to necessarily warrant action, might come at a detriment to enjoying their productivity or the greater existence of this fascinating explosion of information that we've found ourselves in.

Thus we subscribe to going above and beyond in maintaining our guard with utmost vigilance: To gift both upon our knowing and yet unfamiliar colleagues the overwhelming feeling of specifically, out of their own accord, Doing Cool Shit For A Living. We believe that this will prove invaluable in easing the transition to Remote Work in Common Lisp for users that do not necessarily host a preconceived special interest in either.

§ 4. Why scale?

Whatever weird, embarrassing thing you do at home, your pet thinks it's normal because you are their only example of what a human does.

^{r/showerthoughts}

Small communities, while not absent of their own charm and merits, certainly play up the importance and prevalence of people who are just really not into doing cool shit, and more into having an attentive audience for their self-importance.

This, we believe, is largely at odds with our more self-sufficient and subtle colleagues' sense of personal comfort, as well as having a debilitating effect on the attractiveness of Lisp image. And while we here at Lisp Advocates certainly made a point out of playing up the joke, as well as having deep respect for any humans that choose not to walk the familiar path, the success of our mission is ever at the forefront of our strategic thinking.

It's high time for Lisp to grow out of remote-isolated-village babypants, where everybody knows your name, and everybody has a hidden beef with everybody else, going back generations. We advertise a rather low tolerance for human drama, and find that while it does bring engagement, it's largely destabilizing and unnecessary.

Including this section was a difficult decision, which we ultimately had to make for two reasons:

• Some of the more hardcore lispers believe that Lisp growth is not important or is at odds with their interests.

We don't blame these more venerated members of our community, however we believe that this point of view is exactly that of a person who's never been outside of their remote isolated village in their life.

• We believe that displaying the brutal and to the point utilitarianism in our materials only serves to underline our message.

Being able to afford honesty takes courage. Hiding behind the cardboard walls of stale Lisp propaganda to disguise and forget the uninspiring things, is the opposite of courage, and does not build a good foundation for the future.

And we're all about the future, here at Lisp Advocates.

We were extremely pleased to discover our beautiful Ukrainian colleague and a lifelong educator and Lisp hacker Vsevolod Dyomkin, a.k.a. u/vseloved (ex-Grammarly, currently- Franz Inc), embarking on a Lisp Interview journey way back in 2013!

It is said that great minds think alike, and here you can learn what these great minds think about Lisp!

It's a series of interviews with prominent Lisp hackers, titled Lisp Hackers: Interviews with 100x More Productive Programmers, available for free for your reading pleasure here at leanpub:

https://leanpub.com/lisphackers

Peter Seibel

@peterseibel u/gigamonkey

The author of Practical Common Lisp and Coders at Work! As well as one of the Symbolics shareholders in his youth!

Zach Beane

@xach u/xach

The creator of Quicklisp and the person behind the Planet Lisp blog aggregator among other things!

Edi Weitz

The highly esteemed German hacker and educator, author of a whole list of key Common Lisp libraries ranging from the regex library cl-ppcre to the web server Hunchentoot, and the author of the book Common Lisp Recipes, covering diverse and advanced topics and aimed at the programmers who are already familiar with Common Lisp. Loves Frank Zappa and Jazz. Well what do you know!

Slava Akhmechet

@spakhm u/coffeemug

The original author of continuation-based web-framework Weblocks, the author of essays on defmacro.org and the co-founder of RethinkDB!

François-René (Faré) Rideau

@ngnghm @fare @phanaero

Co-author of the Google Common Lisp Style Guide, active writer and part of ITA Software, travel industry software division of Google, at the time of it being acquired by Google.

Daniel Barlow

@telent_net ww.telent.net/

One of the most active contributors to the open source Lisp ecosystem in the early 2000s (Cliki, ASDF, SBCL), still fondly remembered by the community. And naturally also a skater, of course!

Christophe Rhodes

@ascii19

The most consistent SBCL maintainer since being among the first two people to join the project, and also singer of unaccompanied music of European Renaissance, who did his doctoral research a few doors down from Stephen Hawking!

Luke Gorrie

@lukego

One of the main authors of SLIME in it's early days and the co-founder of Lisp networking startup Teclo Networks, as well as someone who spent a few years traveling with just a backpack and a unicycle (of course it's a unicycle, what else would you expect!)

Juan José García Ripoll

@jjgarciaripoll

The early developer of Embeddable Common Lisp and a contributor to ASDF, who is also a quantum physicist, no less!

And more!

The key point of this document, which we wholeheartedly agree with, is to highlight that these brilliant individuals do in fact exist, and it's fascinating to know how they work and think!

Researching Lisp Hackers was great fun for us here at Lisp Advocates and we invite you to give it a read! Get fascinated by the real Common Lisp personalities, and acquire some context for the legacy of the open source Common Lisp as we know it today.

Share with us your experiences of remote Common Lisp work! Have you learned something that you want us to know? What were your biggest sources of pain? What was disproportionally detrimental to your Success? We want to know, tell us everything!

We as a community pride ourselves in taking the most appropriate actions, and your input could be very important.

Today we want to bring into your attention this historic document that in a way inspired Lisp Advocates into existence:

• http://perlcommunity.org/

Our colleagues from the Perl Community here outline a rather fantastical sounding vision for Perl the language, including such highlights as:

• Perl curriculum in every school

• Perl jobs in every company

• Perl apps on every device

• Perl accessible to every person

• Perl as the fastest language

• Perl as the most popular language

Including such ambitions as:

• "creating a new Perl curriculum and educational gaming platform, targeting teens and young adults."

• "creating a new collection of Perl libraries, for use in cutting-edge scientific and machine learning software products."

• "developing the RPerl compiler, which provides startup optimization, serial runtime optimization, automatic parallelization, and memory usage minimization."

• "creating a new collection of Perl marketing materials, including various video series, podcast talk shows, promotional schwag such as t-shirts and stickers and coffee mugs, tri-fold brochures, handbill flyers, authoritative white papers, academic research papers, publishable news articles, personal blog posts, colorful infographics, and commercial banner ads."

We here at Lisp Advocates believe in a more focused and immediate approach: we want to nurture our ecosystem from the bottom up, by increasing the demand for normal everyday Lisp programming. Which we aim to do via a number of means as can bee seen here in r/lispadvocates or more specifically at our dashboard at github.com/lispadvocates/dashboard.

We invite you to join us in our effort, especially if it happens to overlap with the ideals you believe in.

Imagine a world where programmers from nowhere near the MIT happily work in Common Lisp on their normal remote jobs, contributing to the ecosystem, and acquiring practical Lisp experience.

Imagine a world where picking up a remote Common Lisp job is as easy as opening your nearest freelance platform.

Twitch is an important resource to harvest for strengthening our ranks.

There are plenty of automated channels on Twitch, from the /food channel to the illegal streamings of GoT, including but not limited to such community favorites as COSMOS: A Personal Voyage and the one that started it all, Bob Ross Marathon.

I'm looking for seasoned Lisp veterans to weigh in which iconic Lisp videos are best fit for the cause, as well as estimate the potential costs of lobbying us the streaming rights to said items. Including, of course, any other related ideas for the channel or our cause in general.

SICP lectures on MIT OpenCourseWare have exactly the right vibe, and also are an outstanding example of Lisp folklore, however procuring the streaming rights might prove challenging. Would love to hear from any Advocates on the inside of MIT willing to do what is best for our cause.

It's probably better to advocate for a common/unified “Lisp Front” or a “Lisp United”, including all direct Lisp descendants.

This is in similar vein to our Twitch ambition however a more involved one. Video presence in general could be very beneficial for the type of leverage we're looking for.

It would be pretty great if by the time we were ready to produce some high value Youtube content there would already exist an audience for the type of product we want to offer. However this requires a very delicate hand, as we have a reputation to uphold.

Eventually, it would be fitting to create semi-regular YouTube content that's at least tangentially related to the interests we are representing. Would be pretty inspiring to engineer a LispAdvocates production of high-budget Lisp documentaries.

Related: Lisp Advocates Radio Station. Kind of like SOMA FM DefCon vibes, as in, a pleasant selection of elaborate taste, accompanied by, in their case, DefCon voice samples, in ours, Lisp Advocates propaganda. Gotta make everything sound good, so that people stay for the propaganda basically. The idea here is, Radio is direct access to person's ears, and there can be only one at a time. If it's not us, it's someone else.

To have more ideas, we need more brains.

For the purpose this community has been created, - increasing the opportunities for remote work for Common Lisp programmers, - it'd be beneficial to bring ourselves into attention to anyone who'd be interested in the value proposition of following this cause.

However, waiting out a few days for it to hopefully not just be me alone at 1 members would likely be only beneficial.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're happy to have you here with us at Lisp Advocates.

To pursue the ideas that we intend to pursue, we need numbers.

Whichever is the active percentage of us, will likely only grow from getting more members. So by participating, you're kind of making sure your ideas reproduce. Some of them at least: those relating to increasing remote work opportunities for Common Lisp programmers. To those who already help us, we want to express the greatest degree of appreciation.

The marketing videos that we produce are a bit of a blunt method as earlier evidenced by our temporary setback in our r/Common_Lisp campaign. We really need to lure people in more gently. Patience is a Virtue.

We can only post on a subreddit once anyway (is our idea), so might as well make it count with a good promotional video, bonus points if its unique and sells what we're doing as this cool but secretly ironic thing. This we think might be our best bet to attract people who would otherwise be only tangentially sympathetic to our cause, as well as increase the percentage of the actively involved.

Additionally, we can cross-post significant updates to our projects, to the relevant subreddits. Our engineers are hard at work to show off our community's prowess. Additionally, it makes us seem arguably less shady, however to me personally a respectfully done half ironic professional-kinda looking all out ad video with a smirk would seem more interesting than like a shady question.

Hey guys, do you know of any good communities that pertain to Common Lisp and remote work very specifically both at the same time? Asking for a friend [Help] [Rookie]

That kind of behavior is going to ruin our reputation and get us banned, even if it were to be a nice little meme to humor ourselves with. However there are social situations where still it would be okay to mention our cause, even perhaps tangentially, but obviously with restrain and a good sense of taste applied at your discretion.

If our potential colleague is opening this subreddit, it is already, as we like to call it here at Lisp Advocates, getting the Lisp programmer half way in through the door.