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

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

#21

Post by lew89 »

First you have to choose your flavor. If you want to use JVM, probably clojure. Otherwise Scheme, Common Lisp and Racket. Scheme is rather minimalistic, Common Lisp is very functional and Racket is the most modern one I guess. I ended up with Common Lisp and I rather don't look for change. SBCL is implementation I use and like it. Probably the best one and quite portable.

Emacs seems the best choice for Lisp, since it is scripted in Lisp and it's best adapted to it probably. However when I started, I was already so used to vim that I kept going with it. Maybe not the best option, but it's ok, maybe just a little bit more effort to automatize some stuff.

If you choose Common Lisp, this is probably the best book for start: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ . Anyway be prepared, Lisp is not easy to grasp at first, but as soon you do, you will probably love it and appreciate way it is. :)

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

#22

Post by jcubic »

I would start with Scheme or Racket that is based on Scheme. I would start with any Scheme interpreter like Kawa or Guile. If I would recommend any book it would be Sketchy Scheme by Nils M Holm (that I've read recently) https://www.t3x.org/sketchy/ it start with basics but it have lot of details and advanced stuff about Scheme and how it works. It also as title suggest intro to functional programming.

If you would like to learn on line (maybe using pdf book) you can try my Scheme REPL bookmarklet https://lips.js.org/#bookmark so you don't need to install anything on your computer, you can do that later.

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

#23

Post by Rochus »

Tomte wrote: post #10

On Lisp by Paul Graham is a good start: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html Edit: I meant ANSI Common Lisp. Thanks everyone! (I wouldn't even recommend On Lisp as a second text, too much macrology).

On Lisp is mostly about macros (advanced). He has also written "ANSI Common Lisp" in 1996 which is a very good introduction text: http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html

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

#25

Post by st1x7 »

firepoet wrote: post #18
st1x7 wrote: post #6

Is there a good argument against Clojure in this case? My impression is that it's a good lisp and you can get actual work done in it which is an advantage over some of the other options.

How is the VSCode support? I've only used IntelliJ + Cursive for Clojure and am quite spoiled. That's the only reason I might not recommend Clojure for a VSCode user. Now, if said user is interested in switching to Emacs or IntelliJ, I'd think it would be a perfect fit.

I think it makes more sense to pick the language first and then find an IDE for it that you like instead of the other way around.

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

#26

Post by phoe-krk »

firepoet wrote: post #15
phoe-krk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One argument I can think of is that if your problem is not shaped in a functional way, then a functional programming language might be a poor fit for the job. Common Lisp is multi-paradigm language that is pretty bendy with regard to absorbing new ways of doing programming. It gets actual work done as well.

How is it that you think Clojure has trouble doing things in a non-functional way? I'm just curious, as I work in Clojure primarily and may have a huge blind spot I'd love to clear out!

I don't have much of experience with Clojure myself - the above might be my first impressions from the little bit where I've tried it. Well, let me try to fix them then, and ask some questions.

In Clojure, how do you usually approach problems that are shaped in an object-oriented way? In object-oriented languages, this usually includes either some sort of method calls (and therefore mutable state) or message passing (which usually involves actors, like Erlang processes). Passing all state around as function arguments is one way, but it becomes somewhat tedious as state grows large.

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

#27

Post by simongray »

st1x7 wrote: post #6

Is there a good argument against Clojure in this case? My impression is that it's a good lisp and you can get actual work done in it which is an advantage over some of the other options.

The main issue with Clojure is probably its tight integration with the various host platforms. When you get a stack trace in Clojure/ClojureScript, you basically get a Java or JavaScript stack trace, so there is some expectation of familiarity with the host platform. If you already have some experience with the host, then this shouldn't be a big issue, but it's a dealbreaker for some people.

Another issue has to do with startup time. The Clojure application bootstrap process is relatively slow, i.e. start-up might take 1 second, so it's great for server applications, but less great for Android apps or other CLI scripts that expect require instant startup. It has been approached in different ways, e.g. compiling Clojure with Graalvm native image or using ClojureScript instead of JVM Clojure. The latest solution is Babashka which provides a variant of Clojure specifically for writing CLI scripts.

Otherwise, Clojure is an excellent language which both modernises Lisp syntax significantly and implements a very well thought out standard library for doing functional programming. There are many great features, but the standout ones are probably the persistent data structures (which syntactically act both as data structures and functions) and parallelism/concurrency support. It's also very natural to do interop with the host platforms (Java, JS, .NET) and the data-oriented style of programming makes communication between backend (Clojure) and frontend (ClojureScript) extremely simple. So it's pretty much the perfect full-stack language for information systems. I would take a look at the rationale: https://clojure.org/about/rationale

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

#29

Post by simongray »

Tomte wrote: post #10

On Lisp by Paul Graham is a good start: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html Edit: I meant ANSI Common Lisp. Thanks everyone! (I wouldn't even recommend On Lisp as a second text, too much macrology).

Maybe worth nothing that these days Paul Graham recommends Clojure: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1240218967865778177

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

#30

Post by susam »

Here are my recommendations on this topic:

- Choose Common Lisp because it has been the most popular dialect of Lisp in the overall history of Lisp. It is more convenient than Scheme if one decides to develop serious software in Lisp. Clojure appears to be more popular in the technology industry than Common Lisp among organizations (my workplace included) that use Lisp. I still recommend Common Lisp because I believe that it is more likely that one would work on an independent open source or hobby Lisp project than one would encounter one of the rare organizations who use Clojure at work.

- Choose SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp) as the implementation.[1][2] It is the most popular[3] Common Lisp implementation and is recommended in many online discussions. CCL (Clozure CL, not to be confused with Clojure which is a separate dialect) is also another very good implementation.

- Work through this book: Practical Common Lisp: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ (available in print too if you search online). Just use a modern alternative to Lisp in a box when you reach Chapter 2. In fact, I encourage using vanilla Emacs and setting it up with SLIME and Paredit yourself. See Emacs4CL for example.[4]

- A Vim user may consider installing Slimv or Vlime[5]. Slimv and Vlime offer an environment similar to Emacs/SLIME. They display the REPL in a Vim buffer. Slimv also comes with Paredit mode that makes typing and executing S-expressions quite convenient.

- In case you want to postpone setting up Emacs + SLIME or Vim + Slimv/Vlime until a time you have become more familiar with the language, you can also execute your Lisp source code files from the shell.[6]

- Optionally, keep another implementation of Common Lisp. Common Lisp is a standard that is implemented by various implementations. Each implementation may have its own extensions or implementation-specific behaviour regarding error handling, command line options, FASL format, unspecified behaviour, etc. Experimenting with concepts with another implementation of Lisp occasionally may offer some perspective about how some things could be different in different implementations. I keep CLISP around for this purpose.[7][8]

[1]: Install SBCL on macOS: brew install sbcl

[2]: Install SBCL on Debian-based distro: apt-get install sbcl

[3]: State of Common Lisp Survey 2020: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfg7UJRKrkI3OjOHWL4...

[4]: Emacs4CL: https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl

[5]: Lisp in Vim with Slimv or Vlime: https://susam.in/blog/lisp-in-vim-with-slimv-or-vlime/

[6]: Load (execute) code in a file and exit: sbcl --script foo.lisp

[7]: Install CLISP on macOS: brew install clisp

[8]: Install CLISP on Debian-based distro: apt-get install clisp

Disclosure: I am the author of [4] and [5].

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