Great Resource for learning Lisp

wingsofseraphim

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Aug 15, 2006, 8:52:26 AM8/15/06

to LSharp

The book Practical Common Lisp is a great book for learning the basics
and more advanced features of Lisp. It teaches Common Lisp which is a
bit different from L# but it should still be quite useful. I've only
just started reading it and find it fascinating. Just google for it
and you should find it free online.

And one question for Rob: Why did you pick the implemenation of Lisp
that you did? I believe you said it was similar to "Arc." Why didn't
you use Common Lisp or some other Implementation? Just curious to see
the reasoning. Looking forward to more great things from L# in the
near future.

rob.bl...@aws.net

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Aug 15, 2006, 2:55:52 PM8/15/06

to LSharp

Common Lisp is a big language, so the task seemed daunting.

I wanted the language to be well integrated with .NET, so I knew that
meant that I'd be using .NET types and deviating from the standard
anyway. L Sharp was going to be different from the outset.

The main reason though was that I was inspired by Paul Graham's
writings:

http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html

Arc is taking a new, clean, axiomatic approach and I find that idea
very attractive. The core of Arc looks like it will be a fairly small
language. I like Paul's expression that there should be "No Onions in
the varnish". I like Common Lisp, but there seems to be quite a lot of
historic and unnecessary baggage - I think it's time for a clean up.

Thornkin

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Aug 19, 2006, 12:09:20 PM8/19/06

to LSharp

It's not available for free but I recommend Ansi Common Lisp by Paul
Graham over Practical Common Lisp. PCL is a fine book but I found that
ACL was much clearer.

wingsofseraphim

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Aug 21, 2006, 7:35:11 PM8/21/06

to LSharp

I will definitely have to check out Ansi Common Lisp after I'm finished
with Practical Common Lisp.

And I completely see your point about all the unnecessary and historic
baggage that comes along with common lisp. I mean to really develop
with common lisp you have to learn emacs. And to someone who hasn't
ever used emacs before much less linux or unix... it's quite a daunting
task.

Thornkin

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Aug 21, 2006, 11:44:26 PM8/21/06

to LSharp

The lack of good development environments really soured me on Lisp. I
think it is a very interesting language but having to use emacs is not
something I really want to do. I've done the Linux thing but I chose
Vi (Vim actually) which doesn't have any REPL capabilities. LSharp,
especially with Xacc is intriguing to me.

wanorris

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Aug 30, 2006, 6:21:05 PM8/30/06

to LSharp

I've worked my way through most of Practical Common Lisp now, and I've
really liked it. It's well written and engaging, and I especially
recommend it to anyone who starts learning Lisp with a fear in the back

of your mind that you are learning an academic language that's good for

things like AI and writing programs that write programs, but useful for

things that "normal" people might want to do. PCL is full of examples
for taking on normal programming tasks.

The other book I've just started reading is Paul Graham's other Lisp
book: On Lisp. If PCL is oriented toward helping you figure out how to
do things in Lisp that you could do in other languages, On Lisp is
oriented toward teaching you how to do things in Lisp that have no real

equivalent in many other languages -- functions that build functions,
macros, embedded languages, continuations, things like that. So far, it

seems like this will be an ideal second book on Lisp for people
interested in really mastering the language.