Dave Cooper

Devakīnandana das BRS

I am David John Cooper, a software engineer and company founder in Michigan. I met Common Lisp in a university course around 1990, fully expecting never to use it again, and have spent most of my working life since building engineering software in it. What follows is the professional record; a few things I study for their own sake, Korean lyrics and the Devanāgarī script among them, have a corner of their own under Study.

As CTO of Genworks, I maintain knowledge-based engineering and web application software. I founded Genworks in 1996.

As President of the Common Lisp Foundation, I help architect and maintain common-lisp.net and its infrastructure.

As an open-source volunteer I maintain Genworks Gendl (the public KBE kernel) and help with several other open-source repositories.

As a husband, father and householder, I have a whole life away from the keyboard that keeps the rest of this in proportion. It stays there, off this page.

My résumé contains my education and a longer version of my work experience.

Elsewhere: X (Twitter) @dcooper8 · Reddit u/dcooper8

Sites I help maintain or administer

Genworks

• genworks.comKnowledge-based engineering in Common Lisp: the Gendl and Genworks GDL KBE engines and the workstation-in-software that they run in, and the products around them, among them the Prompt Lab, where a modeling agent turns a part described in plain words into a parametric Gendl model, and the Cyclops reverse proxy.
• genworks.devLearning and development resources for working with open-source Genworks technologies.

The Common Lisp community

• common-lisp.net, *.common-lisp.dev, common-lisp.app, cl-foundation.orgProject hosting for the Common Lisp community: project pages, GitLab, mailing lists and a meeting room, run by the Common Lisp Foundation.
• cliki.netCLiki, the Common Lisp wiki.
• quickref.common-lisp.netReference manuals for the libraries in Quicklisp.

Gornskew

• gornskew.comGornskew Enterprises, the gaming division newly spun out of Genworks; its game is at galaxyworld.space.
• galaxyworld.spaceA game: you get a ship and fly it around a galaxy.

Public code

Gendl and the Basalt workstation-as-code

• gendlThe open-source knowledge-based engineering engine: a declarative object language on Common Lisp, with geometry and a web framework.
• basaltThe workstation as a container deployment: the engines, the editing console and the agent door, started with one command.
• readymacsA ready-to-run Emacs for people and AI agents.
• lisply-mcpModel Context Protocol middleware for Lisp environments: how an AI agent works in a live Lisp.
• demosGendl demonstration applications beyond those that ship with the engine.

common-lisp.net

• cl-siteThe common-lisp.net website.
• cl-docker-imagesContainer images of the Common Lisp implementations, for CI and deployment.
• meet-kitA self-hosted video meeting room kit.
• monocleMetering and payments for hosted Common Lisp applications.
• zaclZACL, originally written by Zach Beane: runs AllegroServe on Common Lisps other than Allegro CL.

Writing

• understanding-common-lispThe source of my book Understanding Common Lisp, a short introduction for working programmers, first edition 2026 (read the PDF). It is derived from the third edition of Basic Lisp Techniques, which Franz published in 2000, 2003 and 2011.

Study

• Park Hye Jin, in Korean
• Sanskrit: reading Devanāgarī