Second Lisp to Learn
Sean Devlin
After hacking Clojure for a while, I've come to the conclusion that
studying a second Lisp would help. So, what do the people here
think? What is a good Lisp to study? Are there particular dialects &
distributions that are interesting? The things that are important to
me are:
A community at least 1/10th as awesome as this one. Seriously.
Libs in Lisp - I want to see if there are ideas worth stealing.
Available documentation - I have to be able to read about it, and
teach myself online.
Thanks,
Sean
Mark Engelberg
Use the textbook htdp.org and you will develop a very deep
understanding of how to structure programs in Lisp (and this
understanding will transfer to other languages as well).
You mentioned that you want to see if there are other ideas worth
stealing. Not only does PLT Scheme have numerous educational
features, but it's the basis for a lot of very interesting and
productive research on units, macros, continuations, contracts, mixing
static and dynamic typing, continuation-based web servers, object
systems, and more.
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Andy Fingerhut
some programming in Scheme and Common Lisp.
You can program in a functional style in both, or in an imperative
style in both. In Scheme, functional style is a bit more idiomatic,
so you will find more examples of functional style code written in
Scheme than you will in Common Lisp, on average. That makes it a bit
closer in idiomatic style to Clojure than Common Lisp is.
I can't speak to the awesomeness of the Scheme community, but they do
have lots of on line documentation, and in the last 5-8 years or so
they have taken the small "core" of scheme defined by the revised^5
report on Scheme (R5RS) and also version 6, and extended it with
"SRFIs", Scheme Requests For Implementation. These are often
libraries of useful functionality.
There are many different Scheme implementations. PLT Scheme might be
a good one to start with, in terms of the amount of example code and
documentation that comes with it. I believe it implements many of the
SRFIs, as well as extensions of its own.
Andy
Martin DeMello
great documentation, and under active development.
martin
Jeff Heon
Gambit implementation, which is touted as very fast.
http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
A good way to good if you already use Emacs as your IDE.
For something different but still Scheme based, there is JazzScheme
which comes with its own IDE:
It embraces both fonctional and OO programming and has an optional
type system (with type inference.)
That might be already intriguing for you (or revolting 8p )
See the complete feature list
http://www.jazzscheme.org/features.htm#features.jazz
I has a google discussion group and Freenode channel.
It's also open-source and used commercially.
Harold Ancell
>Hi everyone,
>After hacking Clojure for a while, I've come to the conclusion that
>studying a second Lisp would help. So, what do the people here
>think? What is a good Lisp to study?
While my preference here prior to learning about Clojure has
been Scheme for a *long* time, there's serious value to learning
Common Lisp. There's a LOT of history in it, and plenty of
warts that will make you appreciate Clojure all the more ^_^.
>Are there particular dialects & distributions that are interesting?
See what Dan Weinreb has had to say here (http://common-lisp.net/~dlw/LispSurvey.html, he looked hard a few years
ago to help decide which CL ITA should use for its 2nd
system, an airline reservation etc. system).
SBCL is supposed to be pretty good and produces good code
at the usual expense of compiler time (and it compiles
everything first); ITA is happy using it for their
computationally intense first project, QPX, which gives
you optimal airline trip routing (half a 32 bit address
space runs SBCL, half is data populated by a C++ system).
ITA ended up using Clozure CL for their 2nd project. You
might find ABCL of interest since it runs on top of the JVM,
but I don't gather that it's very mature yet and it
probably has a smaller community than SBCL.
>The things that are important to me are:
>
>A community at least 1/10th as awesome as this one. Seriously.
The Gambit-C Scheme community is perhaps 1/10 as awesome
as Clojure's ^_^.
>Libs in Lisp - I want to see if there are ideas worth stealing.
Common Lisp has a zillion, although lots aren't exactly
finished and/or polished. And then there are famous ...
artifacts that might be worth studying for a variety of
reasons, like Maxima.
>Available documentation - I have to be able to read about it, and
>teach myself online.
There's lots for Common Lisp, several good books, the very
readable and usable language spec in available in a hypertext
format, etc.
If you're interested in OO, CLOS is thought by many to be
the best OO system ever, e.g. see the book _The Art of the
Metaobject Protocol_. Being able to change your object
protocol (how objects work) on the fly is a very powerful
concept....
- Harold
Phil Hagelberg
> After hacking Clojure for a while, I've come to the conclusion that
> studying a second Lisp would help. So, what do the people here
> think? What is a good Lisp to study? Are there particular dialects &
> distributions that are interesting?
Emacs Lisp is definitely the most _useful_ other lisp. Problem is it's
pretty hideous from a design perspective. If you're just wanting to
learn it for new ideas really the only new thing you'll find in it apart
from the Lisp-2-ness of it is the really approachable UI paradigm.
-Phil
Timothy Pratley
> What is a good Lisp to study? Are there particular dialects &
> distributions that are interesting?
The free downloadable SICP lectures (and book) were for me really
illuminating after initial contact with Clojure. Engaging and broad. A
little off topic sorry to hijack your thread, but I like to make a
plug for it whenever the opportunity arises :)
Jonathan Smith
You get Erlang, and you also get s-expressions and macros.
Common Lisp and Scheme are the obvious choices, I suppose.
Learning common lisp I would probably go towards clozure common lisp,
or clisp.
(SBCL is fine (great, even) on linux, but when i tried it last on
windows, there were issues).
For scheme, PLT scheme is awesome, but scheme really isn't my thing.
Kevin Downey
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--
And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
blackdog
Richard Newman
I've seen enough about newLISP to not bother.
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/257#comment-1901
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/39a9e50aa548637f
http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2006/04/20/newlisp-an-intriguing-dialect-of-lisp/
blackdog
Thanks for the links, the last gives a good summary.
I think newlisp is great for scripting, if i were on the jvm on a large
project I'd use clojure, but for tasks that I might use ruby,python, or
perl for i find newlisp refreshingly clean and direct.
It may be warty, if warty means practical. Clojure is practical too yet
here described as an abomination, http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42 - it's
too bad folks trying to get work done get a bad wrap from those in ivory
towers.
bd