Learning Lisp the hard way

I was a bit surprised by the nice and polite tone of the discussion.

Has CLL been evolving towards civility, or is this an exception?

Edit: it becomes rougher at the end, in part because someone trollishly cross posted a response to a Java group... but still...

Some of the personalities who appear in that thread are mentioned in this list of "Mad people of comp.lang.lisp":

http://www.tfeb.org/lisp/mad-people.html

This title is going to be misleading to a lot of people familiar with Learn Python the Hard Way, and other variations using the same methodology.

I find it remarkable that the one troll that came into the thread trying to start a flame bait got debunked quickly, but in a rather friendly tone. That speaks for the community.

I would love to be in a position when I had to learn Lisp for my job. I struggle to learn it because I never find a good use case for it at work or in fun projects.

Some of the things he misses have existed in some environments, but haven't become part of the standard toolset that most Lisps provide. For example, the Lisp Machine had a List Callers command that would show you, and then let you visit, every function that called a given function. I worked at a place where we reimplemented that functionality for ourselves, by poking around in the internals of Allegro, but AFAIK no Common Lisp comes with this feature. It's too bad, I think, though admittedly grepping the source tree is usually an acceptable substitute.

Well, it is true that CL and most Lisp have a standard library that's about as well-organized as PHP.

This article is from 2009. Clojure was not as well known as it is today, otherwise the author would certainly have mentioned it, because he came from Java. There is one commenter who mentions it, but it didn't pick up.