Yes, Common Lisp has a huge number of features. Luckily you don't have to learn all at once to write useful programs. Python is definitely a simpler language. At some point it gets more complicated, when you need to move out of the comfort zone. For example last I looked the main Python implementation had a GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) which makes multi-core concurrent execution a problem. Common Lisp has more sophistcated implementations which don't have a GIL and easier use of multi-core threading. Yes, you need to learn the difference between setting a variable and defining a global…
> Stuff "just works" without a deep understanding of how it works. > The base level of knowledge to use the language is so high that you pretty much need a book (...) to be able to get started. I wonder what that says about developers these days. Ever since I started 'till this very day, it was obvious for me that if you want to learn something, you go pick a book about it. Books aren't scary. They have one of the highest knowledge-transfer-to-time ratios out of any sources you could find; they easily beat videotutorials and text tutorials. Most programming books I've read are also quite…
I keep bouncing off LISP, but keep coming back assuming there is something I'm missing. I'm not convinced it is just 'what is the difference between setp, setf, defvar, and defparameter?' I think it is fundamentally different to how I approach programming. I learned programming back in the 8-bit era, taught myself assembly, etc. I'm almost a hard-coded imperative programmer. I took to C and Java like a duck to water, and I'm guessing LISP advocates think I'm irreparably broken. I agree with TeMPOraL that picking up a book to learn things is a good way to go and shouldn't be seen as a black…
There are obviously many possible paths, so I can only really tell you what I've done. I can't say it's necessarily the best approach. For me, I decided to start with Common Lisp. I installed SBCL, Slime for Emacs, and started working through the book Practical Common Lisp. By and large this seems to be a workable approach, but I will offer up this caveat. The PCL book is very much "project based" in that the author walks you through building a couple of actual applications. This is a Good Thing™ for the most part, but it does mean that you don't necessarily get things in the order you might…
Is Lisp a good choice (for a functional language)? If you want to program in stricly functional and only functional style, being totally forbidden of incorporating side effects into your functions (except via Monads), and want to feel a sensation of "types are checked and enforced everywhere, thus I can sleep happy", then go try Haskell. If you want to be free to do whatever you need to do, to apply the paradigm you need at every moment -- be it procedural, imperative, logic, aspect-oriented, object-oriented, functional... then Common Lisp is for you. If you need the full power because you…
> most people program by page faulting As I said, Common Lisp is not for most people. This Web 1.0 page describes the concept: "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" http://norvig.com/21-days.html > But again the landscape is dominated by FOSS. Which landscape? There is not one landscape. Is Apple's XCode FOSS? Windows dev tools? Open Source? If you believe in FOSS, you can use SBCL, CMUCL, CLISP, ECL, MKCL, Clozure CL and several others. I use SBCL and Clozure CL. > CD's are more old-school than landlines. Write games with Land of Lisp then. But sorry, the Common Lisp community is…
Yes, it is remarkably difficult to get into Common Lisp—or at least, it was until Practical Common Lisp (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/) came out, and it still is for topics PCL doesn't cover in-depth (e.g. CLOS). On Lisp is definitely not a good beginners' resource. It's a great book in many ways, but I would never recommend it over PCL. Lispers in general tend to have a fairly old-fashioned mentality (due, no doubt, to many of us being older) about many things. I think it's fair to say that there's much less of a sharing mindset, and much more of a closed mindset; the other way of…
> I really liked Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel ( https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ ) however, ignore the environment setup: the recommendations it makes are no longer maintained, these days Portacle is the best way to get started. A bunch of us from Freenode IRC have formed Common Lisp Programming Challenge (CLPC) at https://github.com/spxy/clpc in order to help beginners get started with Common Lisp (CL) while learning the language from Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel. The outdated environment setup in the book can indeed be a genuine hurdle for a beginner. Portacle is a great…
Practical Common Lisp lives up to its name as the most practical of introduction texts, covering all the core topics and including many small example projects. Touretzky's Gentle Introduction is popular, but targeted more at people entirely new to programming. The nice thing about this book is it is more like a college textbook in that it has many homework questions with answers in the back, so its great for structured practice. Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp is still my favorite introductory text assuming the reader has knowledge of an existing functional language (using Javascript…
Yeah. CL's pathnames are a bit confusing to people though, because they came about as a way to handle several different types of file paths from various operating systems which preceded UNIX / POSIX. For those who're interested, there's a pretty good overview of them in Practical Common Lisp[0]. I'll quote the first paragraph of the subchapter "How Pathnames Represent Filenames", which serves as a decent TL;DR: "A pathname is a structured object that represents a filename using six components: host, device, directory, name, type, and version. Most of these components take on atomic values,…