CLiki: Susam

Susam

Susam /suːsʌm/ is an open source developer. In the world of Common Lisp, he works on Common Lisp tooling to make Common Lisp more approachable for beginners. He has contributed to Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Vim (SLIMV) and Portacle. He is the developer and maintainer of MathB, a mathematics pastebin written in Common Lisp. It was the longest-running service of its kind, serving its user community for over a decade until its discontinuation in March 2025. He also maintains Emacs4CL, a tiny quick starter .emacs for setting up vanilla Emacs for Common Lisp programming.

Susam began teaching himself Common Lisp using GNU CLISP 2.41 on Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (Etch) at an airport during a long layover in 2007. Since then he has moved on to other implementations and uses SBCL primarily these days but keeps an instance of GNU CLISP around for nostalgia's sake. For others like him for whom the GNU CLISP welcome banner brings warm memories, here is a snapshot of it from version 2.41:

$ clisp
  i i i i i i i       ooooo    o        ooooooo   ooooo   ooooo
  I I I I I I I      8     8   8           8     8     o  8    8
  I  \ `+' /  I      8         8           8     8        8    8
   \  `-+-'  /       8         8           8      ooooo   8oooo
    `-__|__-'        8         8           8           8  8
        |            8     o   8           8     o     8  8
  ------+------       ooooo    8oooooo  ooo8ooo   ooooo   8

Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Michael Stoll 1992, 1993
Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Marcus Daniels 1994-1997
Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Pierpaolo Bernardi, Sam Steingold 1998
Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Sam Steingold 1999-2000
Copyright (c) Sam Steingold, Bruno Haible 2001-2006

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Susam is an active IRC user and can often be found on the Libera Chat channels #commonlisp and #emacs. He also operates the #algorithms and #bitwise channels on the same network. The latter serves as a relaxed reading and discussion lounge for those interested in mathematics and computer science. Many members of this community share a strong interest in Common Lisp and Emacs, so you're very welcome to join and take part in the conversations.

Person