Chunky Bacon in the Land of Lisp | Hacker News Reader

Chunky Bacon in the Land of Lisp

flyingmachinestudios.com

3 pointsQuarkSpark4 comments

I am a rubyist who has wanted to learn lisp. However, the plethora of lisps has made this choice difficult with people advising to start with one lisp (scheme, iirc) and then move over to lisp.

Could you tell me which lisp you are using? IIRC, there's SBCL and various others. Thanks for putting down the resources you are reading. Have you considered clojure or other alternatives? How did you decide on CL ?

I started with CL because I started learning lisp through the excellent book "Land of Lisp". However, I've since moved to Clojure, which I would recommend over CL. The main reason is that you can do more with Clojure. The packaging system is a lot easier to deal with, and you have a lot more at your disposal through your access to Java libraries. Another good reason is that Clojure is just more pleasant to deal with than CL. For example, there are many CL implementations and dealing with their differences is a pain in the ass. With Clojure, you have a lot more good ideas baked right into the language.

I hope this helps!

Thanks, I have a Java background, so that should help. However, from what I recall many of the articles on learning Clojure recommended learning Lisp/Scheme first. Do you agree?

Also, they strongly recommended learning Emacs (I have been a Vim'mer for about 20 years, and I like keeping my Vim simple with only a few plugins).

Does one just jump into Clojure or how do you recommend it? If lisp/scheme first, then which one? Thx.

It's hard for me to really say, but at the least I can talk about my own experience. I began learning Common Lisp by going through "Land of Lisp" by Conrad Barski, and because it was so fun it really helped to keep me motivated while learning such a different way of programming. The book was also useful in that you learned through writing short programs which actually did something, which I found to be a great teaching style. I mean, I really, really loved going through that book.

As far as I know, there are no comparable books for Clojure. However, once I became familiar with CL, it was not at all difficult to pick up Clojure. Sure, Clojure has some new ideas, especially when it comes to mutability and concurrency. But in terms of the basic language, it's very similar to CL and in many ways it's easier to work with.

As for emacs - I also strongly recommend using it. It has great support for lisp and really makes development a joy. Emacs itself is written in a lisp variant, elisp. If you do decide to go with emacs, use this: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit . It's a great set of packages pulled together by someone who, it turns out, is very big in the Clojure community. I'm not really sure what the best resource is for learning emacs these days.

I've really enjoyed the way I've learned lisp, and I feel comfortable recommending that you start with Land of Lisp and emacs. I hope this helps!

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