Ask HN: any suggestions for a Lisp project to start with? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: any suggestions for a Lisp project to start with?

13 pointsgsivil8 comments

I am just about starting to learn LISP. I am not expert in programming. I was thinking of a one month project(1-2 hours per day) for introduction.

I am not interested in anything internet-related, and the less graphics the better.

Any reasonable suggestions?

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Don't do long ambitious projects in Lisp. Instead, implement a small library everyday. Do something that itches you now, and be done with it the moment you get bored.

It's more fun and educational that way.

If you cut yourself a "project", the remaining 10% will suck the life out of you and it's not fun.

Try not to close your Emacs. You need to be able to find lisp on an impulse. Do all your arithmetic calculations with it, first. And gradually write your shell scripts in it and other admin types. Download libraries and read their sources; you can get to the definition points by typing M-. in Slime mode.

I encourage you to indulge yourself, have fun, and feel free to jump from project to another. In fact, you will do just fine having multiple "projects" in one source file; I had scratch-buffers tens of pages long.

Hedonistic, irresponsible programming :-)

Thank you very much

Both these books walk you through creating various interesting applications in Lisp, from servers and databases to games:

http://gigamonkeys.com/book/

http://landoflisp.com/

Thanks. I've got already the ANSI common LISP to have as first reference and after seeing some posts here I am considering getting the landoflisp some time soon.

ANSI Common Lisp is good. I did _all_ the exercises.

You might consider playing with GUI stuff with LTK:

http://www.peter-herth.de/ltk/

Project Euler is nice because Lisp (Common Lisp anyway) is good at dealing with large numbers. It's also reasonably fast.

Anything you find interesting. You will be more motivated to work on something that you truly care about.

I have recently decided learn a bit beyond the basics of two programming languages: Python and Lisp

I have already started using Python for something that I truly care about: simple phyics simulations

Lisp is for me something that I want to learn for the fun of it. And because I trust people saying that lisp programming is very rewarding experience. I have not some side project that I truly care about, I am just thinking that following the little examples that the Lisp books suggest is not the path that I want to take at the moment.

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