[pro] Are you an Imager or a Filer?

[Andreas Fuchs]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 07:45, Ala'a Mohammad <amalawi at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm interested to hear what others use CL. How do
> they manage day to day work? how do their preferred style mesh into
> their production pipeline (coding, debugging, deployment and
> maintenance)? and what makes them prefer one way over another or the
> mix if applicable?

For loading required software, I'd say 100% filer. ASDF and Quicklisp
make operating on files to easy for me that I just don't want to waste
any energy thinking about what definitions are in the image and which
I've saved in a (source-controlled) file somewhere - the 30 seconds I
spend waiting for software to load are nothing compared to an
afternoon spent debugging a function whose definition in the image
differs from what is in the file containing its (alleged) source
code... Or worse, functions/variables that are present only in the
image, and not in any file.

When it comes to throw-away code, though, I usually just type it into
the repl or the slime-scratch buffer. But: once throwaway stuff starts
becoming useful, I use quickproject and paste the latest definitions
into a source file and check that into git ASAP. Of course, this step
has the potential to go wrong in the same way I mentioned above: if I
manage to forget a definition, it's debug time again. Fortunately,
that happens early enough in the source's lifetime that it's not hard
to find the definition again.

As for deploying, I have started making quicklisp trees containing the
requisite software and a git checkout of my project. You can still
incrementally load stuff, and you can be pretty certain that what you
tested truly is what you deployed (-:

Hope that's useful,
-- 
Andreas Fuchs, (http://|im:asf@|mailto:asf@)boinkor.net, antifuchs