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Comment by coold | Hacker News Reader

Can I read SICP while learning Clojure? Is lisp very different?

I wouldn't, unless you already know Scheme well. Otherwise, you're essentially learning two programming languages at once, and you won't know if your mistakes are because you misunderstand Scheme, Clojure, or both.

There are a few people who have translated the solutions to Clojure, this one looks like the most comprehensive: http://www.sicpdistilled.com/

It looks like only chapter 1 is completed. A lot of chapter 2, and the just bits of 3 and 4.

Not sure Clojure can do all the recursion stuff (TCO), which would be good to have in a language, when working through SICP exercises. I would not recommend it for SICP. Better start with a Scheme, to have the least amount of friction.

You can trivially use recur for self-recursion: call (recur x) instead of (my-fn x) inside your function.

(There's also trampoline for mutual recursion cases)

Is trampolining automatic, or does it have its own syntax as well?

Even a little thing like (recur ...) could be a tiny amount of friction. But good to read, that the usual cases are apparently handled well in the language.

The builtin helper function is called trampoline, it's a higher order function that relies on the mutually recursive functions returning "trampolines" or closures that do the desired subsequent call.

The trampoline pattern is an old trick that can also be imlemented in other languages to avoid stack consumption in mutually recursive calls.

I know what trampolining does, thank you.

That's unfortunate, that it is an additional function call, which needs to be explicitly written out. I'd guess such is necessary ultimately, because of limitations of the JVM and its limitations regarding recursion.

> Can I read SICP while learning Clojure? Is lisp very different?

Clojure is Lisp!!! with some nice out of the box semantics like immutability.

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