Comment by klibertp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klibertp | Hacker News Reader

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> The only thing I've really found lacking is support for basic string operations. I'm sure there is a solid library out there for things like replace(), but it seems silly for everyone to possibly be using separate libraries

It's not that bad, there are other languages which have this problem - you can see exactly the same situation in JS-land, for example. It would be much worse if not for quicklisp. I think quicklisp and asdf are among the best package distribution tools: I feel it's better than pip and gem and similar to npm. Installing a library is literally a single line in your code. There's the problem with finding the package you need and it's harder than with JS and npm, but doable.

BTW: what do you do to learn CL? I'm using StumpWM as my window manager and I think it's one of the best ways of learning CL. With SLIME, then, you get almost Lisp-only environment, especially if you use Emacs for your other editing too. I wrote a couple of blog posts[1] about StumpWM and posted my config on GitHub[2].

[1] https://klibert.pl/posts/stumpwm.html https://klibert.pl/output/stumpwm-better-modeline.html

[2] https://github.com/piotrklibert/stumpwm-config/

If you already know another programming language, you can try PCL[1]; it's a decent introduction. If you get stuck on something feel free to ask on IRC (#lisp on freenode).

There is a library called alexandria[2] that covers a lot of obvious missing-features from the standard library (e.g. emptyp to test for an empty sequence).

Lastly the hyperspec[3] is actually quite useful as a library reference.

1: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/

2: https://common-lisp.net/project/alexandria/draft/alexandria....

3: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/Conte...

> what do you do to learn CL?

The best thing I've done is watch a video on making a reddit clone in Lisp. I couldn't get the libraries to work, but I plan on using other libraries to do the same thing either tomorrow or the next day. It's made me realize that I really need to start walking through other people's code. https://vimeo.com/138249727

Google's LISP koans which is ~30 exercises where you complete the code and make the tests pass. Covers everything from mapcar to multi-threading. https://github.com/google/lisp-koans

I'm currently on Ch. 9/32 of Peter Seigel's "Practical Common Lisp". I find the book to be a much better resource after already being familiar with the topics covered. It does a great job of going into the nuances and gotchas of the language, but because is so much more text than code, it's hard for me to appreciate all of those little details if I'm still trying to grasp the fundamentals of the topic. http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

I write all the code I see with a pencil and paper (including all of those koans). I read a block of code and then try to rewrite it from memory.

Currently using vim. Haven't gotten around yet to using a live environment.

  Future resources:
    Paul Graham's "Roots of Lisp"  
    Paul Graham's "On Lisp"  
    Build a Lisp compiler  
    SICP  
    Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming
    Upgrade my editor

Yeah, there's a lot I want to go through. It's gonna take me a few months just to go through all of the resources I have bookmarked so far. And I haven't even started looking for code that I want to read. End goal is to master Lisp.

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