HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

GeoJawDguJin

106 karma · joined January 23, 2009

submissionscomments
GeoJawDguJin··on How to Pick a Language
Clojure is what you'll want to be using if you ever start doing "real programming" in a useful, expressive Lisp. Don't start with it, though.

In the following order:

    1) Learn Scheme and get through SICP. Wind up with
       enough of an appreciation of Scheme that you could
       write real programs in it, given enough patience.
    2) Attempt to learn Common Lisp.
    3) Become frustrated and give up on Common Lisp.
    4) Learn Clojure instead, and become overjoyed at the
       real work you can get done.
I'm mostly joking about steps 2 and 3. They're based on my own experience with CL (and Elisp) and might not apply to you. Going from Scheme to Clojure will be a bit of a shock, though, because the former is absolutely as sparse as possible with lexical punctuation, and the latter is totally littered with it (particularly stuff that's borrowed from Perl and Ruby). If you've written enough Perl, though, you might not care.

By the way: Scheme is Latin, and CL is Ancient Greek. ;)

GeoJawDguJin··on How to Pick a Language
You don't really learn PHP so much as catch it.

Like a disease.

← PreviousPage 2 of 2