Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 211 posts

Re: Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?

#131

Post by Jtsummers »

roberthahn wrote: post #118

I remember wanting to learn lisp. I got stuck and reached out to the community for help. And found them to be very hostile. I decided I had better things to do with my time.

As a counter-anecdote (giving us anecdata), I did not have this issue when I got started. r/lisp and comp.lang.lisp were pretty welcoming. I don't do much on IRC, but my limited time there was productive and friendly.

There were (probably still are) a few assholes and zealots on comp.lang.lisp, but they were easy enough to ignore (killfiles are your friends). I think some people also got a bit testy and short there because of the trolls. People like Jon Harrop liked to go on there and basically say, "You're all morons and lisp is useless garbage here's why..." as a way of promoting F#. It was incredibly obnoxious, and I recall during his time as a troll there people becoming overly sensitive to other posts that looked like trolling but were meant in earnest. This would have been off-putting if you got caught in the crossfire.

Re: Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?

#133

Post by finmodbod »

susam wrote: post #71
ragnese wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit off-topic, but something you said resonated with me. > The PCL book is very much "project based" in that the author walks you through building a couple of actual applications. This is a Good Thing™ for the most part, but it does mean that you don't necessarily get things in the order you might expect. > > There's a part of me that almost wishes I'd started with a book that takes more of an approach of "…

> I feel like I'm in the minority in that I prefer to NOT learn things by just "diving in". I am much more successful when I start from the absolute fundamentals. A bit more off-topic, but this resonated with me. I too feel more comfortable when I start with the absolute fundamentals. When something does not work, knowing the fundamentals helps me to reason about why it does not work from the first principles. On sim…

I fixed CL as my first programming language to learn just 4-5 days back (after 3 weeks of mulling over what to learn) and had installed Portacle yesterday. A fellow redditor kindly listed out few steps like you suggested above, and I tried it for the sake of experience. It was not detailed as yours hence I was stuck until I saw this post on Reddit.

The instructions in your link were fantastic and easy. Thanks a lot for this !!

Re: Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?

#134

Post by Olical »

masukomi wrote: post #130
pixelmonkey wrote: post #13

Racket Scheme & SICP is a fun way to start playing, especially if you are into theoretical concepts of CS and programming, like higher order programming and abstraction. The documentation for Racket is excellent, see e.g. https://docs.racket-lang.org/quick/index.html ... and many people have created online resources to adapt SICP to Racket, as well as other learning texts. I like Beautiful Racket, e.g. https://beauti…

I have to second this. Racket is absolutely the best place to start. There are great books for beginners, and the documentation is top notch. it comes with its own editor (Dr. Racket) that does some really helpful things for beginners, like hovering over a variable and seeing lines drawn to where it's being used. It's not the fastest lisp, but that's ok. It's spectacular for learning and has a huge ecosystem too. My…

I'm trying to make the neovim lisp world a little more pleasant with Conjure :) just for those that absolutely can not switch to emacs long term (like me)

https://github.com/Olical/conjure

It's written in a lisp, runs as lua and supports: Clojure, Fennel, Racket and Janet with a bunch more to come.

Re: Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?

#135

Post by zelphirkalt »

coold wrote: post #84
pixelmonkey wrote: post #13

Racket Scheme & SICP is a fun way to start playing, especially if you are into theoretical concepts of CS and programming, like higher order programming and abstraction. The documentation for Racket is excellent, see e.g. https://docs.racket-lang.org/quick/index.html ... and many people have created online resources to adapt SICP to Racket, as well as other learning texts. I like Beautiful Racket, e.g. https://beauti…

Can I read SICP while learning Clojure? Is lisp very different?

Not sure Clojure can do all the recursion stuff (TCO), which would be good to have in a language, when working through SICP exercises. I would not recommend it for SICP. Better start with a Scheme, to have the least amount of friction.

Re: Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?

#137

Post by susam »

finmodbod wrote: post #133
susam wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like I'm in the minority in that I prefer to NOT learn things by just "diving in". I am much more successful when I start from the absolute fundamentals. A bit more off-topic, but this resonated with me. I too feel more comfortable when I start with the absolute fundamentals. When something does not work, knowing the fundamentals helps me to reason about why it does not work from the first principles. On sim…

I fixed CL as my first programming language to learn just 4-5 days back (after 3 weeks of mulling over what to learn) and had installed Portacle yesterday. A fellow redditor kindly listed out few steps like you suggested above, and I tried it for the sake of experience. It was not detailed as yours hence I was stuck until I saw this post on Reddit. The instructions in your link were fantastic and easy. Thanks a lot f…

Thank you for the feedback. If you like Emacs4CL, please do take a look at the "Show HN" post for it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25440690

Indeed the intention behind the .emacs and detailed documentation for it was to make it easy for beginners to set up a Common Lisp development environment with Emacs and SLIME quickly while understanding every step of the setup process. I am glad you like it!

Re: Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?

#139

Post by SkyMarshal »

The Little Schemer series is a good introduction to Lisp/Scheme parenthesis-style recursive programming.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-schemer-fourth-edition

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/seasoned-schemer-second-editi...

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/reasoned-schemer-second-editi...

They’re written in a Socratic way, as a series of questions and answers. A good way to learn is to follow along and answer them yourself using Racket (before turning the page and seeing the answer). Racket is quick and easy to setup and use:

https://racket-lang.org/

Re: Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?

#140

Post by npsimons »

Lot of comments here, many good, so I'll try not to duplicate, but:

  1. Emacs is a hurdle, but one that's worth it when you use SLIME.
  2. I went through Barski's "Land of Lisp" and enjoyed it, but couldn't get the web server to work, so I tweaked it to use Hunchentoot[0]
[0] - https://github.com/npsimons/land-of-lisp-using-hunchentoot/c...
Post reply on HN