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Comment by doomrobo | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off-topic, but does anybody know of a kind of "LISP Challange" set? I recently started the Matasano challenges[0] and I found them really well-suited to my style of learning (learning by doing and expanding by reading relevant material, enabled by my own internal motivation). Is there anything like that that has a relatively small set of condensed yet rich challenges that demonstrate key elements from LISPy functional programming? I read some of SICP but reading long form really puts a damper on my motivation/excitement. Also there were a lot of exercises (with a lot of overlap in concepts) so I didn't know what to do and what not to do, since I wasn't about to do every single one. Any pointers would be much appreciated!

[0] http://cryptopals.com

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From the top of my head..:

The Praetorian Bootcamp challenges are similar to the Matasano ones: https://www.praetorian.com/challenges/

Lisp Koans: https://github.com/google/lisp-koans

Project Euler: https://projecteuler.net/

Exercism: http://exercism.io/

99 Lisp Problems: http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~meidanis/courses/mc336/2006s2/func...

the Lisp Koans, Exercism, and 99 Lisp problems look especially good for FP concepts (and the first two are more modern than I had expected). Thanks!

I've been using python-koans to teach Python, but the thought of looking for lisp-koans from Github didn't even cross my mind now as I personally started learning CL. Thanks for these excellent links!

Hi, I don't know if it fits what you want. But there is something like that for clojure[0] . I liked the language a lot. I didn't have the chance to use it in production yet. Another option is hacker rank with challenges [1] [0]https://www.4clojure.com/ [1]https://www.hackerrank.com/

http://exercism.io supports Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, and Emacs Lisp, plus a ton of others, and runs through a neat little CLI app locally, so you can use your own editor (I've been doing Rust challenges in Emacs, frex.)

http://www.codewars.com/ also supports Clojure, and Haskell, which is not a Lisp but is FP.

Hacker Rank pretty much supports everything, but the reason for this is that it handles all the tests through stdio instead of a test suite, resulting in a lot of irritating boilerplate code.

Well, that stdio thing is actually what I love about Hacker Rank :) I don't think the boilerplate code is a problem, if you use a reasonable language. Racket is a pleasure to use over there, Clojure slightly less so but wouldn't call it irritating...

But yeah, I've seen some Java solutions on HR...

I just wind up getting irritated having to rewrite the same code all the time. Some popular languages will generally come with a pre-filled template with the I/O already covered, but quite a lot of the FP stuff didn't.

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