Many Common Lisp programmers have found that Google is not very useful in answering their questions. It is not uncommon to hear “I can’t find answers on Google” from CL programmers. Even the famous Xach1 (Zach Beane) has said that.

The reason for this problem is likely that CL questions are addressed in forums and mailing lists rather than in expansive blog posts.

Zach wrote an in-depth post about how and where to get help with your Common Lisp questions. It is not an exhaustive list but it covers the most important options. The sidepanel on subreddit /r/lisp contains a more complete list of resources and naturally the blogs about Lisp will increase as more people start to use it.

Below is a summary of Zach’s information for the benefit of those in a hurry. It is worth reading his complete post at least once to get more insight on each of them.

For general Lisp questions go here:

For questions about a specific library, start with its own mailing list2 and then try the list above.

For questions about your implementation, go to its own mailing list. (Zach gives links to the most prominent ones.)

When you are about to post a question, take Zach’s advice on how to ask a question. It will likely save you time.

  1. If you don’t know about Xach you have not yet installed Quicklisp. ↩

  2. Some libraries you are likely to use:

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