Ask news.YC: For the lisp experts - tell me how you learned the language.

I don't think it's that important that you use DrScheme (I suppose that's what you mean with PLT Scheme). If you do, make sure the 'language' is set to standard Scheme, not some 'safe' subset. In The Little Schemer, you go from absolute zero all the way to using continuation passing style, motivating and deriving the Y Combinator, and writing a metacircular evaluator.

I've been picking up bits and pieces, and would not call myself anything near an expert. I knew what Lisp was from a Languages class in college, and we actually used lisp to implement a language. Roughly none of it stuck, except for car, cdr, and the idea of using prefix notation and the 'everything is an expression' idea.

Relearning it started with just reading PG's essays and getting curious. Being too lazy to order it online, I looked in every bookstore and library I encountered for ANSI Common Lisp, but never found it. It's rather pricey, too, which is why I was hesitant.

I started with SICP and the video lectures. Something important came up in another part of my life, though, and I basically put Lisp on hold for several months.

When I finally got settled down again, I started playing with with emacs-lisp. I knew emacs would be useful no matter what happened next. I downloaded the manual (which is dense) and scrounged for tips on the internet. The idea was that I'd get familiar thinking in that style and using it for practical things, before moving on to something more serious. Emacs-lisp has some limitations (no closures, for example), so it wasn't too long before I started looking elsewhere.

My next two sources were On Lisp by Paul Graham and Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp by Peter Norvig. Both books include speedy overviews of Lisp, and point you to Guy Steele's Common Lisp The Language (2nd ed) (CTL2), which can be found online, for authoritative reference. Both books are good because they are exciting and fun. Norvig has a fairly gentle introduction, while Graham assumes you're already familiar with many Lisp operators. I don't actually think that's a big problem, and you shouldn't let it scare you away from at least trying to read it. I think it's easier to read the first few chapters of On Lisp first and get excited about looking up the details, than it is to slog through a reference or a mundane introduction beforehand.

I've set aside Lisp again, (though I'm keeping my eye open for opportunities to use it), though I have obtained a copy of ANSI Common Lisp which I also highly recommend. Even if you don't need the introduction, the book includes a large reference section that's a bit more 'user-friendly' than CTL2. The last significant reference I've used is Practical Common Lisp by Peter Siebel, which can be found online.

On Lisp, by Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence: Case Studies on Common Lisp by Peter Norvig

ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham

The GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/elisp.htm...

Practical Common Lisp by Peter Siebel http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

Common Lisp the Language: 2nd Edition by Guy Steele http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/a...

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

1. A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html

2. Practical Common Lisp http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

3. ANSI Common Lisp http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html

4. On Lisp http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html

5. Paradigms of Artifical Intelligence Programming http://norvig.com/paip.html

6. Lisp in Small Pieces http://www.amazon.com/Lisp-Small-Pieces-Christian-Queinnec/d...

SICP is also amazing...and there are at least three sets of videos to go with the book (Abelson/Sussman and HP/MIT, ArsDigita, and UC-Berkeley.)

I did only remember the German title (Metamagicum). Thanks for finding the English one.

Emacs + Slime + SBCL

Emacs + Quack + PLT Scheme

I also tried DrScheme (which is a great learning environment).

Not knowing what i'd really need I also did some searching and discovered a few books:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/t-y-scheme/t-y-scheme.html

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

i also purchased the little schemer. I learned various interesting things from these different sources.

1. practical common lisp was essentially useless to me since i'd already been kind of feeling sold on using scheme and had very little interest in common lisp. what it DID teach me was how datastructures in lisp are created under the hood (or how one might go about implementing them). from this perspective it was very nice and helpful when understading, car, cdr and mapcar. although i wish i'd had a nice example of implementing a scheme in C.

2. reading The Little Schemer, has been the single most satisfying read of my entire computing life. so much so that i bought The Seasoned Schemer and The Reasoned Schemer without hesitation at price. this book will teach you to "think lisp" if you can just make it through the first book you will honestly know everything you need to about the lisp mindset and be ready to actually write useful code and no be shocked or surprised by anything. i can't stress enough how useful this book is READ IT.

3. Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum days has been a powerful reference for me and I honestly hope that it grows and evolves, it's easy to reference and great for when you start actually hacking on projects. It's just simple and obvious.

4. SICP is a mammoth work and also has a very nice video series. If you're serious about Lisp and even more serious about Scheme and furthermore serious about computing. You must read this. My approach so far has been to read top down (ie. cover to cover) and also use it as a reference. I get sheer joy from reading it, but it's amazing how practical it can be as well.

Personally I've settled on scheme, i dont' really like common lisp i find it irritating and with projects like Chicken: http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org out there I feel really comfortable. I re-wrote my entire blog using nothing but chicken and the web-scheme egg. I recently wrote an irc bot for fun during a huge bot writing session that broke out in a channel i frequent (don't ask we all just started writing bots for some reason).

If you're looking for good platforms the best I can recommend are:

SBCL (hands down nothing really compares so far)

PLT Scheme (aka DrScheme if you like GUI's)

Chicken (the absolute best imho BSD licensed scheme)

Hope this helps everyone. This is such an awesome thread i hope it continues for awhile.