31–40 of 180 posts
For instance "I'm new to Lisp, I want to try one..." is a person without a lot of background and information to make that choice. And they probably realize it and it makes them nervous about making that choice.
For me the complete spec is the killer feature. You can learn Common Lisp in 1990 and write it the same now. As long as we can keep the compilers alive it will be forever. It’s funny to me that it was critiqued for being “bloated” when now it looks like a focused minimal library.
Common Lisp wasn't standardised until 1994. Also, SBCL has some nice features specific to them, I'm sure it's the same for other implementations. So while there's a lot that's common between them all I find myself using a lot of platform specific functions.
I have a work-in-progress called Modus. 100% written by Claude, so take that however you will. The current release boots on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. The next release (unreleased in the pipe for ~ months) is standard Common Lisp on bare aarch64 (pi) and x64 (qemu for now), with linux aarch64 and x64 command line interfaces à la sbcl. https://github.com/modus-lisp/modus Since you can't use an OS by itself, I've rounded…
That's pretty neat! God help me if I fell down a hole like that. I must say, however, that e.g. code like (compile-compound) is something only an AI can love!
Since a few folks here recommended Common Lisp to me as the language that would "tick all my boxes", I've been doing a deep dive. Right now, I'm working through SICP again with DrRacket. The first time I worked through it with MIT Scheme MANY years ago. It's shocking how much I've forgotten. What I like about this article is that it walks through the different "camps" of Lisp. Scheme is so intriguing to me because of…
I can also recommend clojure. For me it has the best parts of common lisp and the best of the java ecosystem. But its also quite different from common lisp and scheme. Different enough to find some unique ideas. Writing scripts using [0] Babashka is also really nice. [0] https://babashka.org/
I would be happy with (neo)Vim setup as well, but that was way behind Emacs and broken when I tried.
I really wanted to Lisp as a main programming language, and sometimes I still do. I just find readability such a hurdle regardless of how long I used it. I didn't find that it ever became as natural as the other group of programming languages. I find a procedural style of programming so much easier to reason about, both when writing and reading. Either way, I'm really happy I took some time to learn it and use it a l…
Shut up and learn Common Lisp using Practical Common Lisp. This would be my advice. Why? My own road was haphazard. Other books broaden your mind and teach you really cool tricks. This book gets you using lisp like you would say golang. But it still teaches you the lisp things and broadens your mind. Time spent choosing will be better spent reading this book. After that PAIP, On Lisp, SICP etc.
An Introduction to Programming in EMacs Lisp is also good for the first few chapters even if you don’t use emacs because you are given fundamental concepts of lisp that can be applied to the understanding of other dialects. It’s also free.
Learn you a Haskell (despite Haskell being not a flavor of list, they share similar DNA ) is great at understanding functional programming with lisp like languages.
Why prefer lisp-1 over lisp-2 or vice-versa?
Shut up and learn Common Lisp using Practical Common Lisp. This would be my advice. Why? My own road was haphazard. Other books broaden your mind and teach you really cool tricks. This book gets you using lisp like you would say golang. But it still teaches you the lisp things and broadens your mind. Time spent choosing will be better spent reading this book. After that PAIP, On Lisp, SICP etc.
Since this is the largest gathering of LISP users I have seen, I have a question. Why prefer lisp-1 over lisp-2 or vice-versa?
Common Lisp and Racket are Lisp-2s but honestly, the namespace thing seems like a minor difference compared to all the other features that differentiate them.