If you would like to get some hands-on experience with PicoLisp, you can download the latest version here. It should compile and run on current 32-bit GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X (Darwin) and Cygwin/Win32 distributions.
PicoLisp is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under the conditions of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Please take a look at the README file, the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), the PicoLisp Tutorial, the guide to PicoLisp Application Development, or the PicoLisp Reference, and download
Then follow the instructions in the INSTALL file.A native 64-bit version is also contained in the release. Please refer to the documentation in doc64/README, doc64/asm and doc64/structures.
The PicoLisp Home Page at www.picolisp.org holds further articles, documentation and a discussion forum.
Any feedback is welcome! Many concepts in the PicoLisp system are not well documented yet, and might not be obvious to a traditional Lisp programmer. So please don't hesitate to ask, and join our discussion in the PicoLisp Mailing List or at the IRC #picolisp channel on FreeNode.net! (see also The Mail Archive)
Note that there is also an ongoing development ("testing") version of the next release available (still subject to change), and an archive of previous releases (see below).
Since picoLisp-2.3.0, the Java Applet GUI is no longer part of the standard release. If you still want to use it, please download picoJavaGUI.tgz and unpack it in the installation directory.
For something even smaller, download miniPicoLisp.tgz. It is a minimal version, without support for databases, UTF-8, bignums, IPC, networking and other system-dependent functions. A kind of "pure" PicoLisp (not "pure Lisp"!). It supports the full PicoLisp language, but runs faster, and uses even less memory space. It should also not be restricted to Unix. In addition, it compiles and runs also on 64-bit systems.
Jon Kleiser wrote an OpenGL library gl.tgz, and a Chinese Checkers program running on top of it.
Doug Snead wrote about his experiences in porting PicoLisp to Cygwin.
Henrik Sarvell's introduction "At a First Glance" gives an excellent entry point to practical usage, and explanations several concepts in detail.
An introduction to writing browser-based applications in PicoLisp, using the XHTML/CSS GUI-Framework, can be found in the "PicoLisp Application Development" tutorial. In the last section, it describes a minimal but quite complete Application. ERP in 700 lines! :-)
Some philosophical and practical aspects are discussed in "A Radical Approach to Application Development (PDF)", and a description of PicoLisp DB and GUI Development principles is in "A Unifying Language for Database And User Interface Development".
If you'd like to try the online-version of the toy RC Flight Simulator (the plain Xlib version of it is also included in the distribution), point your Java-enabled browser (directly, without a proxy) to rcsim.7fach.de.
Hope you enjoy :-)