Ask HN: Starting with Lisp

3 points·JaggerJo··2 comments

I've read a lot of good stuff about LISP (in general common lisp) and would like to play around with it in some toy projects.

Does the flavour of lisp matter much? (Common List, Scheme, Racket, Clojure)

What's a good environment to start programming in LISP on a Mac? (IDE)

Any resources you'd recommend?

Thanks in advance!

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Well, you can learn Scheme from the classic Computer Science text: “The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”, and use the DrRacket environment to play around with it.

https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf

https://racket-lang.org/

This will help you configure DrRacket to interpret the Scheme used in SICP - which allows you to play with the book examples and solve the exercises:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19546115/which-lang-pack...

Solutions to the exercises (if you’re struggling!):

http://community.schemewiki.org/?sicp-solutions

My recommendation is to use Portacle as your IDE and run through Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel over the course of a few days. Both are available for free online and very easy to get set up with. Practical Common Lisp provides a good foundation level of knowledge, which you can continue to use as a frame of reference for the other Lisp dialects and features as they come up (e.g., Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2, hygienic vs unhygienic macros). Once you have the fundamentals of Common Lisp down, I'd say you can then follow your interest and choose an appropriate Lisp dialect for the type of project you want to create.

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