I've recently started on the road to Lisp but am getting there via Racket. What am I missing out on versus Common Lisp?
A Road to Common Lisp (2018)
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Re: A Road to Common Lisp (2018)
#12It's funny how all these writings miss to explain how to figure out what a function/symbol does. When I want to know what print does in Python, I can type: help(print) and get some useful information. In Lisp there is a function too, that I wish someone told me when I was a freshman: (describe 'print)
Re: A Road to Common Lisp (2018)
#13I've recently started on the road to Lisp but am getting there via Racket. What am I missing out on versus Common Lisp?
I would say nothing but also everything. Racket is Schema and Lisp mashed up. Though Common Lisp is very easy to read once you have Racket down. Personally, I prefer Racket for my personal side projects.
Re: A Road to Common Lisp (2018)
#14The "kludges" joke he shows in the index of a lisp book is excellent.
Re: A Road to Common Lisp (2018)
#15It's funny how all these writings miss to explain how to figure out what a function/symbol does. When I want to know what print does in Python, I can type: help(print) and get some useful information. In Lisp there is a function too, that I wish someone told me when I was a freshman: (describe 'print)
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/CLHS/Body/f_docu...
documentation is also a good one to know. Common Lisp makes pretty much the entirety of the system available to you programmatically. Browsing the CL Hyper Spec is a good way to discover these things, too.
Re: A Road to Common Lisp (2018)
#16I've recently started on the road to Lisp but am getting there via Racket. What am I missing out on versus Common Lisp?
For what you're missing probably mostly just what is described in the "Escaping the Hamster Wheel of Backwards Incompatibility" section. Racket itself is a more reliable and stable language than many, maybe most, but common lisp is on another level with that shit. It has good and mature libraries for nearly everything, where racket has them only for most things.
Also if you know you ultimately need to deploy a native binary and only a native binary will work, common lisp historically produces alarmingly fast native binaries. I haven't needed to use this in racket much so I can't directly compare; it doesn't seem to prioritize perf but still seems to be much faster than other languages that don't prioritize perf.
I definitely prefer racket though. It's a bit clunky in places too but is overall much better planned and still has all the extensibility benefits.
Re: A Road to Common Lisp (2018)
#17I was exposed to Common Lisp in college in a "Programming Language Concepts" class, almost 20 years ago, and it didn't "click". I got no help or assistance or explanation, and this was pre-youtube and Google so it was hard to find an answer to "why is this happening?" But I gave Clojure a try despite the bad taste in my mouth Common Lisp left, and it was def worth it. To try it out real quick: https://tryclojure.org/
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Re: A Road to Common Lisp (2018)
#18Has anyone used the “Land of Lisp” book, or Exercism.org to learn Common Lisp? Any other fun alternatives for learning lisp?
Depending on what you think is fun, I found the author of this intro to CL[0] very engaging and fun. I'd still run through gigamonkey's practical common lisp for something different alongside it.
Then you should be set to start tackling the boring nerd stuff.
Re: A Road to Common Lisp (2018)
#19Has anyone used the “Land of Lisp” book, or Exercism.org to learn Common Lisp? Any other fun alternatives for learning lisp?
Land of Lisp is fun, and the video is a must![0]; I also really like Norvig's PAIP (Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, available for free now on GitHub[1]). PAIP shows ways of programming in Lisp that really are unlike what I've seen in most other languages.
Lately I have been working the Exercism exercises and there are over 80 Common Lisp problems, with more problems being added over time (my hope is to finish what's there and then help by adding some more).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM1Zb3xmvMc [1] https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp
Re: A Road to Common Lisp (2018)
#20I was exposed to Common Lisp in college in a "Programming Language Concepts" class, almost 20 years ago, and it didn't "click". I got no help or assistance or explanation, and this was pre-youtube and Google so it was hard to find an answer to "why is this happening?" But I gave Clojure a try despite the bad taste in my mouth Common Lisp left, and it was def worth it. To try it out real quick: https://tryclojure.org/
I love clojure but hate that’s it a JVM language