A little out of the ordinary...

I'm curious if anyone else has run into this problem: You're really good at Visual LISP and can make magic things happen on AutoCAD, but when it comes to coding Pong in C+ you curl into the fetal position and shiver. You'd give your kingdom for a way to bridge the gap between this sexy scripting language that you can barely get to display to your Window command line and programming beautiful visual applications that you can impress your friends with.. friends who don't have an AutoCAD to run them on.

The closest I've found yet is BlitzMax (http://www.blitzmax.com), which is a coding environment geared toward video game programming. It uses a combination of BASIC and C+, as well as adding in several new functions: if you want to draw a square, you use the "square" function. The package of functions is very similar to what AutoCAD and Visual LISP can do: if you want to draw an object and move it around the screen, you'd draw an object and give it a name (like an entity), then edit its points. It's a sweet thing, but the problem is, I'm good at LISP, not C+/BASIC.

I've spent many hours of research and pulled much hair out trying to break away from AutoCAD but keep my precious LISP. I've tried Emacs and SLIME, as well as Clisp and others. Hours were spent just figuring out how to use them, hours were spent then figuring out that they were completely useless to me.

So I'm curious, and this seems like a good forum to ask this on. Has anyone managed to find a program which gives LISP life beyond crunching numbers, organizing lists, managing files and AutoCAD? I'm at the point where I'm all but willing to bite the bullet and create one myself, from scratch if need be, but it means I'd have to learn a lot more of what I don't know, and it might not even be possible for me, and I have no idea where to start.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Try searching here:

http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=lisp