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Common Lisp Books

lisp-lang.org

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Re: Common Lisp Books

#21

Post by blacktriangle »

sea6ear wrote: post #10
sudhirkhanger wrote: post #8

How can I learn enough Lisp to understand Emacs well?

Emacs includes a book, or maybe it's in the list of installable packages called An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp (I think the package is called 'eintr') that does a pretty good job as an introductory lisp programing text and then gets deeper into the internal functions of Emacs. By the later part of it I felt like I had a decent handle on Emacs Lisp and could read the code for packages I was interested in…

Emacs as of quite a while has included the contents of this book in the Info system under "Emacs Lisp Intro"

Re: Common Lisp Books

#22

Post by blacktriangle »

pedrodelfino wrote: post #5

I really liked "Common LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation", from David S. Touretzky. I think it could have been mentioned. Unlike Practical Common Lisp, it has exercises and extensive sections in each chapter just on tools (such as dribble, trace, describe, step, et cetera). Moreover, I was expecting to see "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming", from Peter Norvig. I have not fully read i…

I'd second Gentle Introduction, but only if the reader is willing to actual do all the excersizes in the book. It moves slow and covers less material than other books mentioned, but I found the slow pace and practiced repetion really help the language click for me.

What I found really useful was to work through the excersizes in a proper SLIME setup in Emacs with paredit. Since the excersizes were easy enough I could instead focus on learning to use a proper development setup for working with Lisp.

Re: Common Lisp Books

#23

Post by spapas82 »

mumblemumble wrote: post #7
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #6

This is awesome. I had an introductory lisp course in college and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. To this day it’s the only programming language I’ve tried and been unable to understand (“I could just never grok lisp - it’s incompatible with my brain”). Given a few introductory, free texts, I might be well on my way to remedy that :)

It's not a Common Lisp book, but I'd highly recommend The Little Schemer if you're looking to grok lisp.

The little schemer is great, especially in understanding recursion and tail call optimization (pass an accumulator to track the result as a parameter). However I was never able to understand the chapter that builds the y combinator (and I actually was never able to understand that concept)...

Re: Common Lisp Books

#24

Post by Jach »

nanna wrote: post #16

Whats the best stack for building a website or webapp in CL these days? Is it worth it?

Hunchentoot is the most popular as a server (and I suspect most people wrap their deployment with either nginx or apache) though two frameworks listed on https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#web-frameworks worth checking out depending on your preferences are Radiance and Lucerne. Link also has other related web stuff; like many things it's hard to say something is the "best" in its class, there are just options and some are more popular. On the front-end there are a few projects floating around that look to be aimed at replicating some of the concepts and workflows from the ClojureScript world for SPAs but I don't think any of them are really ready.

I'm not sure it's worth it unless you just want to write CL almost exclusively. It's cool though to have more variation on different deployment (or even "do it in production") workflows available to fit your tastes, from something like PHP's/CGI's copy/edit files loaded each request, to a more conservative shutdown-deploy-restart cycle, to connecting via SSH and then inspecting/debugging/editing the live program through a forwarded REPL socket in your favorite editor just as if you were doing it locally.

Re: Common Lisp Books

#26

Post by vindarel »

nanna wrote: post #16

Whats the best stack for building a website or webapp in CL these days? Is it worth it?

I'd say it's worth it to the mid or long term, so you'd benefit from CL's strengths and advantages. It's more difficult than mainstream languages to start a web app only because there are less material, project templates or full blown frameworks to get started, so you better know the web already. In addition to the awesome-cl list of libraries, I recommend to check out the Cookbook https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html to grok the different parts of a lisp (web) app.

And, shameless plugs: a web project skeleton: https://github.com/vindarel/cl-cookieweb (very new), a demo of hot reloading a running web app (locally or deployed): https://github.com/vindarel/lisp-web-live-reload-example

Re: Common Lisp Books

#27

Post by jnxx »

I think Peter Seibels and Edmung Weitz' books are both fantastic books with a comprehensive and modern view. Can't recommend them enough.

Re: Common Lisp Books

#28

Post by mumblemumble »

spapas82 wrote: post #23
mumblemumble wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a Common Lisp book, but I'd highly recommend The Little Schemer if you're looking to grok lisp.

The little schemer is great, especially in understanding recursion and tail call optimization (pass an accumulator to track the result as a parameter). However I was never able to understand the chapter that builds the y combinator (and I actually was never able to understand that concept)...

If it helps, I'm rather fond of this explanation: https://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html

Especially this part, from toward the beginning:

> Before I get into the details of what Y actually is, I'd like to address the question of why you, as a programmer, should bother to learn about it. To be honest, there aren't a lot of good nuts-and-bolts practical reasons for learning about Y. Even though it does have a few practical applications, for the most part it's mainly of interest to computer language theorists.

The article goes on to explain why you should learn it, anyway, but, still, it's not like monads and Haskell. Despite the concept's intellectual cachet, you don't need to understand it to be an effective lisper. That said, this opinion is mine and mine alone, and stands in direct contradiction to the sentiment expressed in the following paragraph.

Re: Common Lisp Books

#29

Post by pronoiac »

pedrodelfino wrote: post #5

I really liked "Common LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation", from David S. Touretzky. I think it could have been mentioned. Unlike Practical Common Lisp, it has exercises and extensive sections in each chapter just on tools (such as dribble, trace, describe, step, et cetera). Moreover, I was expecting to see "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming", from Peter Norvig. I have not fully read i…

Norvig's PAIP is available to read online: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

I've helped on the ongoing work of ebook cleanup.

Re: Common Lisp Books

#30

Post by spapas82 »

mumblemumble wrote: post #28
spapas82 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The little schemer is great, especially in understanding recursion and tail call optimization (pass an accumulator to track the result as a parameter). However I was never able to understand the chapter that builds the y combinator (and I actually was never able to understand that concept)...

If it helps, I'm rather fond of this explanation: https://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html Especially this part, from toward the beginning: > Before I get into the details of what Y actually is, I'd like to address the question of why you, as a programmer, should bother to learn about it. To be honest, there aren't a lot of good nuts-and-bolts practical reasons for learning about Y. Even though it does have a few pr…

Thanks for the link I'll take a look. I agree that you don't need to understand y to be an effective lisper. I have used lisp and various other functional languages over the years in various projects and there wasn't a use case for y combinator...
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