Develop Lisp applications using the Cusp Eclipse plug-in

Cusp is a development environment for the Common Lisp programming language. Using Lisp, you can develop all sorts of applications, including Web applications. Lisp is the second oldest programming language still used widely today (after Fortran) and is known as the first functional language. The creation of Lisp began in the late 1950s and was first implemented in 1958 by the MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Project. Its strength is in the processing of lists: AI and symbol mathematics. In fact, Lisp is short for "list processor," which was the need under which this programming language was created, as you'll see in the following paragraphs (see Resources for Lisp historical information).

You'll notice that Lisp is not at all like other general programming languages. For example, in most general programming languages, you perform multiplication just as you would on paper: int times = 5 * 5;.

With Lisp, the following would produce 75: (* 5 5 3). The maximum in this list: (MAX 9 8 7 6 20) returns 20.

Notice that the phrase "first functional language" here is apt, as everything is based on functions. Each function can have a variable number of parameters. The processing of these lists using recursion and Lisp functions like car and cdr is the power of list processing using Lisp.

Given Lisp's age, you can find many development environments for it. However, also inherent to old programming languages, the tool support is mostly text-based and not intuitive for newcomers. Thus, one reason to try Cusp is that it has an intuitive GUI for newcomers to learn and develop Lisp in, rather than a text-based "try-to-remember-all-of-these-commands" type of interface. It also has the advantage of the superb project management features inherent in the Eclipse GUI framework.