Hacker News Reader

Comment by quinndupont | Hacker News Reader

This article scares me. My mediocre programming skills will never be able to handle Lisp. Damn.

Never give up on goals you still care about. Get a beer and some notepaper. Write down some notes about how you can be a better programmer. Think about topics slightly out of the domain - how you represent ideas, how you explain ideas to people, how you try to understand ideas that are explained to you, how you read code. Think about how you can improve. Think about some deliberate practice exercises. Take what's useful from doubters and ignore the rest. You'll get there.

Also you can watch the lectures by Abelson and Sussman themselves[1], also on MIT OpenCourseWare.

[1] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

[2] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

Thanks, maybe I'll give it a go (I like the idea with the beer and notepaper!)

Don't be. The Lisp family of languages is not as scary or difficult as some people make out of it. I personally found it less mind bending than Haskell (which is a different beast altogether).

I'd suggest you to give Scheme a try, its more minimal than Common Lisp and IMHO simpler to start off with. All you have to keep in mind is that syntax in Scheme is both uniform and minimal. What you also need to remember is that Scheme is probably unlike any other language you have encountered (The Algol family), so you must not try to program in Scheme the way you do in say C or Pascal.

Agree, Lisp is actually very easy to learn initially. You don't have to grow a beard and stop bathing, just have some fun with the basics and see where it leads you.

Well, I've got a beard, and I don't bathe much already...

Start with _The Little Schemer_ or _Land of Lisp_* . It's really not hard, less difficult than a language like Java. It's different, though, like APL or Erlang are different.

* The former uses Scheme, the latter uses Common Lisp. While you could get caught up in the lengthy debate over which (if either) is superior, it's probably a better to just pick one and learn the basics. Then, you'll be able to make an informed decision later.

Practical Common Lisp (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/) is great if you already know some programming.

For someone scared I would strongly recommend http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/

I don't recall _The Little Schemer_ being any kind of gentle introduction.

_The Little Schemer_ is likely the gentlest possible introduction (unless you have a peanut allergy). It's a quick read, too.

Perhaps you're thinking of SICP?

I'm definitely not thinking of SICP, but now that I look at the table of contents of _The Little Schemer_ I must have been thinking of another book. It had an innocuous title but very tricky and subtle contents. It wasn't very long. And it wasn't _Simply Scheme_ either.

Okay. If it helps, the formatting for _The Little Schemer_ is very distinctive: a lot of short question-and-response pairs, with (perhaps overly) cutesy drawings of elephants. _The Seasoned Schemer_ is harder, but it's the sequel.

If you like the format, _The Little MLer_ is one of the best intros I've seen to ML-style type systems.

I definitely support the "grab a beer and relax" step 1. Download a scheme (I like mit-scheme) and solve some problems from Project Euler. No worries if you make no progress, you're just goofing around.

Using Lisp the same way as you do other languages isn't any more difficult than using the other languages, after you learn the syntax and the basic tools of course. It's what you can do after you've learnt the basics that sets Lisp apart.

In other words: the beginning of the learning curves of Lisp vs. other languages are about the same. Lisp's curve just continues after that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com