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CL or Scheme?

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41–47 of 47 posts

Re: CL or Scheme?

#41
Newlisp is my favorite Lisp dialect. Before that I used Scheme and before that, CL. I prefer Newlisp because combination of dynamic scope and fexprs is conceptually simpler and more expressive than combination of lexical scope and macros. If reader doesn't believe me, he can check what Thomas Lord wrote on Lambda the Ultimate site, http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3640

He really understood fexprs well. Or John Shutt's disertation. Or, this part of Alan Kay's interview: http://kazimirmajorinc.blogspot.com/2010/02/alan-kay-on-fexp...

Criticism of Newlisp? Well, yes and no - but, the point of every Lisp is, and particularly NL is - if something is missing, add it for yourself.

Picolisp is similar to Newlips, it is really minimal, very fast interpreter, written in assembler.

Other dialects have other advantages. But I'll stop here.

Re: CL or Scheme?

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would Clojure be worth trying rather than CL or Scheme for someone who doesn't have any Java experience, though?

With Clojure 1.2.0 and the build tools Leiningen or Cake you can get very far along w/o needing to know much about Java.

Thanks for the meaningful response. I know CL (sbcl . clisp) and Scheme (Chicken . Scheme48), but haven't done much with the JVM and I've been uncertain what relevance Clojure has.

Re: CL or Scheme?

#43
post #14
post #8

A little off topic, but I notice a lot of people new to Emacs and Lisp banging there heads trying to get Slime set up and running, when Emacs has excellent Lisp support right out of the box. Slime is excellent, but complicated (even by Emacs standards). I wouldn't recommend a user installing it until a specific need arises. I can't imagine trying to learn Lisp, Emacs, and set up Slime all at once.

Setting up SBCL+Emacs+SLIME is really easy if you use Ubuntu or some other distro that contains packages for them. All you need to do in current Ubuntu is $ sudo apt-get install sbcl emacs slime && echo "(require 'slime)" >> ~/.emacs and then start emacs and press Alt+x, write `slime´ and press enter (M-x slime for the initiated). Now using all the available features of that combination will take a lot of time, but s…

[deleted]

Re: CL or Scheme?

#44
post #19
post #5

I'm a huge fan of Scheme. Not so much because of the language itself as for its ubiquity. You can find a Scheme interpreter for almost any platform, and for those that don't have one yet, it's actually tractable to implement an interpreter yourself (in some other language). It's also a very elegant and beautiful language. At the end of the day, though, your customers care whether your product is beautiful, less so wh…

I'm like the OP in that I've set up the environment and am up to Ch 12 in Practical Common Lisp . Plus it finally motivated me to learn emacs after a couple of decades of vim. The extract from the Land of Lisp makes me think I might enjoy Scheme more, since I'm just learning Lisp at home for fun. Can you recommend a particular online learning resource? I've had a quick look at MIT's videos of their lecture series, bu…

SICP isn't as entertaining, but it's a classic. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

Also, The Scheme Programming Language. http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/

Re: CL or Scheme?

#45
post #26

'lisp in a box' ran out of the box, pardon the cliche , for me

It didn't work for me at all, unfortunately. Example: The Allegro CL version included is so old that Allegro refuses to license it.

Re: CL or Scheme?

#46
post #44
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm like the OP in that I've set up the environment and am up to Ch 12 in Practical Common Lisp . Plus it finally motivated me to learn emacs after a couple of decades of vim. The extract from the Land of Lisp makes me think I might enjoy Scheme more, since I'm just learning Lisp at home for fun. Can you recommend a particular online learning resource? I've had a quick look at MIT's videos of their lecture series, bu…

SICP isn't as entertaining, but it's a classic. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ Also, The Scheme Programming Language. http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/

The Scheme Programming Language now has a 4th Edition:

http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/

Re: CL or Scheme?

#47
post #46
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SICP isn't as entertaining, but it's a classic. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ Also, The Scheme Programming Language. http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/

The Scheme Programming Language now has a 4th Edition: http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/

Thank you to you both.
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