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Comment by rick2047 | Hacker News Reader

rick2047

Umm...analyzing self...Beep...Beep...Beep...Panic...Panic...Panic...... I have all the characteristics for a BBM, from top to bottom. Whats worse?I dont even ,know lisp!!!!!What do I do what do I do????!!!!!!!!1

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First, it's not a bad idea to find a project you can work on with another person or two - a lot of the BBM character weaknesses are consequences of being independent even when it's a net loss. In some sense, this is an echoed in some Lisp systems that try to be Lisp "all the way down", rather than inter-operating with existing systems. Rewriting an entire software stack can be pretty quixotic, and at the very least distracts from whatever you set out to do initially.

If you want to learn Lisp (and I'm not sure - I may hear a hint of sarcasm), the book _The Little Schemer_ (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/) is a good starting point. It's a quick read, and will walk you through several of the big ideas in a (somewhat minimalistic) dialect of Lisp called Scheme. Whether you'd be happier using Scheme, Common Lisp, or some other Lisp dialect in the long run is hard to say, but you can get through that book in a weekend, and the main ideas it covers will apply to all Lisps. (You might find the style excessively cute, but it's short.)

_SICP_ (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) is absolutely worth reading as well, but really working through it will take much longer. It too uses Scheme, but covers several big ideas in programming that transcend specific languages. (I recommend _The Art of Prolog_ for the same reason.)

Start here: http://clojure.org

I dont know but your advice does not appeal to me, I mean clojure just doesnt cut it. And i dont wanna go into the hassel of anything java (it ate up my master high school end project, I rewrote it in ruby then). What about haskell I know its not totall Lisp but seems better than clojure

They are fundamentally different languages. Clojure is dynamically typed, Haskell is statically typed (despite its great type inference). Clojure is relatively small and simple to learn, Haskell is larger and far more complex (it introduces many new concepts). Clojure is based on the JVM, Haskell is not, but it's backed up by many researchers who publish libraries on Hackage. Different strokes, really.

If I got down voted so many times just for this comment clojure sure must be a fine language.But I am still not going to learn it just because it targets the JVM. But maybe some day I will forget the 3 sleep less nights I spent rewriting the project in ruby or the A- I got where I had expected an A++, and try to look into clojure.

I think the fact it adresses the JVM is a nice thing that allows you to get away with writing Lisp code when your corporate overlords demand you to write Java code. ;-)

Now, more seriously, it seems a rather useful Lisp that somewhat deals with the problem of partial/buggy/worksforme library implementations by using the huge Java class library.

I dont understand why people are taking that post of mine against clojure so seriously, and if they are why they are misinterpreting it. I never said anything against the language or even the JVM in they-are-very-bad sense.Its just a psychological block that was created when my project crashed In front of my teacher, and I simply blame it on JVM. I know that its wrong, because I never debugged it. I just rewrote the whole thing in Ruby without any investigation. Maybe I was wrong,maybe my code was buggy or my project just didnt deserve and A+ (my teacher never gave me any reason for the minus in my grade). I just needed something to blame my crashed project on. Call it escapism and you are right actually. But still when you put something in your mind, a sheer hate for a thing when you are just 13 or 14 you tend to hate it forever. May be thats the case with me. May be it isnt and I am just too stubborn. Maybe I will just learn clojure after my term paper is submitted and then will write a post. Now what I wanna see is what I write in that post

Start today: http://arclanguage.org/

If he wants to learn such an obscure (popularity-wise) language, he's probably better off using a popular (relatively), well-documented, well-supported (libraries) and stable dialect such as Common Lisp or Scheme.

I've just started learning Lisp and I find Arc fun. Hence, the suggestion. There are some nice people like coconutrandom, CatDancer, palsecam, zck and conanite who are active and helpful on the forum e.g. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10554. The unofficial code repository Anarki is pretty good too.

People are doing some cool stuff - http://arcfn.com/labels/arduino.html

What's not to like?

Join the club ;-)

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