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Comment by spooneybarger | Hacker News Reader

To others in a similar position: if you want to learn a lisp, I think racket ( aka plt scheme ) would be the easiest introduction.

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I'm very impressed with Racket.

* The documentation is fantastic. Insanely easy to browse around, very well formatted, and interconnected nicely.

* It comprises of multiple languages, and they can all interoperate - r5rs, r6rs, racket, etc. This has always been a major pain point for me when it comes to Scheme dialects - lots of implementations clinging to r5rs and using incompatible module systems.

* PLaneT has a ton of libraries covering many fields, and it's great that it's integrated into the language (requiring something from PLaneT will automatically download it).

* The community seems nice enough.

I also love that the new site immediately shows off the language: http://racket-lang.org/

(now curious:) Why do you feel Racket is a good introduction to Lisp?

It has been designed for teaching so there is a lot of material on their site geared towards learning. As part of that, it has a nice set of tools that make it easy to get started.

There are a lot of books that teach intro to programming in scheme so there is plenty of offline material as well. The little schemer, SICP, How To Design Programs.

See http://docs.racket-lang.org/.

It also has an active mailing list that is quite noob friendly.

EDIT: oh yes, and it is very a 'batteries included' environment. so you can worry about learning the language rather than getting your environment setup.

I also think Racket is a good introduction to Lisp. The documentation is great. Take a look at the vector documentation as an example http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/vectors.html?q=vector&.... If you are not familiar with the language, there are plenty of examples to help you get going.

I recently started working through The Practice Of Programming and I wanted to compliment it with a functional language. I thought it would make the on ramp to functional languages a little smoother by first coding something in a language I'm familiar with and then port it over (producing more idiomatic scheme is the next iteration). I chose scheme as the compliment and PLT/Racket as the environment. So far, it has been working well.

Racket is great, and I'm not trying to pick nits, but it's not a Lisp, it's a Scheme dialect. If you want to learn pure Lisp, I'd recommend Paul Graham's book, On Lisp, which is available online for free.

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

Scheme is a lisp. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)

Scheme is a Lisp; it's just not a Common Lisp.

Not advocating either way, but it was always (and still is) interesting to read what Erik Naggum had to about Scheme's Lispiness: http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/search?q=%22scheme+is+a+...

Not only is Scheme Lisp, but On Lisp is absolutely not a beginner's book.

"... but it's not a Lisp ..."

It is.

"... pure Lisp ..."

There is no such a thing as "pure Lisp". Lisp is not a programming language, it's a family of programming languages that share some common properties.

To put it more clearly, we could represent Lisp and its members hierarchically:

    Lisp
        Common Lisp
            CLISP
            SBCL
            ...
        Scheme
            Racket
            Gambit
            Chicken
            ...
        Clojure
        ...

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