4 ms·

I would add that reading SICP or HtDP is not enough, you need to work through the exercises to sink in the important programming principles they try to teach yo

by motxilo 16y ago

I would add that reading SICP or HtDP is not enough, you need to work through the exercises to sink in the important programming principles they try to teach you. Also, I miss the Schemer/Lisper series by Friedman et al. in that list. Just out of curiosity, regarding claims like "Common Lisp has a fairly sized community which is widely regarded as a tough bunch" or "The Scheme community is really one of the most tolerant communities of them all", are those based on personal experience? How did you come up with such conclusions? I'm really interested :)

apl 16y ago
Having interacted with both, I can definitely say yes. Post an obvious or basic question to comp.lang.lisp, and enjoy being ripped to shreds.
- bphogan 16y ago
  This type of attitude is what keeps some aspiring people away. How does a beginner know what an obvious question is? Honestly I'm long past tired of this attitude among developers. When you're really good at something you've been doing for a long time, your definition of hard and easy changes so much. I can say that building web applications with Rails is the easiest way to go, but I've been doing it for almost six years. When I teach a class on Rails to complete newbies, it takes us 8 hours to comfortably get through setting up the environment, writing some basic code, and ending up with little more than a few pages and a scaffold. So when I ask for help from someone who has done significant work with something I want to learn, I'm hoping that they'll remember what it was like when they get started, and not tell me that my questions are "stupid" or "obvious". I may not even know what resources I should have looked at first.
  - blue1 16y ago
    I am no lisp expert, and I'm well aware of the legendary cloud of terror and harshness which is said to hover on comp.lang.lisp. However, by lurking there for a while, I came to understand better the reasons of the residents. Here, "obvious" means "I don't even remotely know what I'm talking about, but I find easier to ask stupid questions instead of studying a bit and then ask reasonable questions." The fact is, Common Lisp is a niche language, and one that is not easy to learn (until you want to translate from your-language-of-choice to lisp, which is pointless anyway). Until one wants to dedicate some time digging this wonderful and partly forgotten civilization, there's no sense wasting time with it, either yours or the others'. But if one does his homework, I've found that the quality of the help provided by the community is the highest I've ever seen.
dragonquest 16y ago
I would say this is from personal experience based on lurking on CLL and a couple of dumb questions I asked on #lisp once. I don't really mind the CL community, its just that the help starts once you've one (atleast, even the introductory one's) or a major chunk of one book down cold. After that they're really eager to show you the path. Compare this with many other language communities, people regularly ask questions regarding where are the installer's kept which is answered with great politeness by some good netizen. The contrast only occurs that the benchmark of the CL community starts at a higher bar. Recently though, as I wrote in the blog post, even the big-name lisper's seem to guide newbie's to LispBox's URL or suggesting the command line to install SBCL on Ubuntu which certainly is making CL communities a fairly friendly place to be. The #scheme guys are just amazing. So are the individual mailing lists of the implementation Racket. Somebody on #scheme actually held my hand (metaphorically) to clear my confusion as to which function is the "main" function where execution starts. I used code a little in C/C++/Java and was expecting a function named "main" even though I was testing individual functions from the DrScheme IDE's split window REPL.
- motxilo 16y ago
  I find rather amusing that lispers and schemers differ that much when it comes to lend a hand to people, especially when Scheme is a dialect of Lisp. Do lispers regard the poor schemers in an envious way just because tail-call optimization is part of the Scheme standard? :) No, seriously. Nowadays, it seems like people sometimes forget what they struggled with when they were learning the ropes of some technology.
blue1 16y ago
Never had any problem with the CL community. You often get really good and extensive replies, provided you don't ask questions before connecting the brain.

by motxilo 16y ago

apl 16y ago

Having interacted with both, I can definitely say yes. Post an obvious or basic question to comp.lang.lisp, and enjoy being ripped to shreds.

bphogan 16y ago
This type of attitude is what keeps some aspiring people away. How does a beginner know what an obvious question is? Honestly I'm long past tired of this attitude among developers. When you're really good at something you've been doing for a long time, your definition of hard and easy changes so much. I can say that building web applications with Rails is the easiest way to go, but I've been doing it for almost six years. When I teach a class on Rails to complete newbies, it takes us 8 hours to comfortably get through setting up the environment, writing some basic code, and ending up with little more than a few pages and a scaffold. So when I ask for help from someone who has done significant work with something I want to learn, I'm hoping that they'll remember what it was like when they get started, and not tell me that my questions are "stupid" or "obvious". I may not even know what resources I should have looked at first.
- blue1 16y ago
  I am no lisp expert, and I'm well aware of the legendary cloud of terror and harshness which is said to hover on comp.lang.lisp. However, by lurking there for a while, I came to understand better the reasons of the residents. Here, "obvious" means "I don't even remotely know what I'm talking about, but I find easier to ask stupid questions instead of studying a bit and then ask reasonable questions." The fact is, Common Lisp is a niche language, and one that is not easy to learn (until you want to translate from your-language-of-choice to lisp, which is pointless anyway). Until one wants to dedicate some time digging this wonderful and partly forgotten civilization, there's no sense wasting time with it, either yours or the others'. But if one does his homework, I've found that the quality of the help provided by the community is the highest I've ever seen.

dragonquest 16y ago

I would say this is from personal experience based on lurking on CLL and a couple of dumb questions I asked on #lisp once. I don't really mind the CL community, its just that the help starts once you've one (atleast, even the introductory one's) or a major chunk of one book down cold. After that they're really eager to show you the path. Compare this with many other language communities, people regularly ask questions regarding where are the installer's kept which is answered with great politeness by some good netizen. The contrast only occurs that the benchmark of the CL community starts at a higher bar. Recently though, as I wrote in the blog post, even the big-name lisper's seem to guide newbie's to LispBox's URL or suggesting the command line to install SBCL on Ubuntu which certainly is making CL communities a fairly friendly place to be. The #scheme guys are just amazing. So are the individual mailing lists of the implementation Racket. Somebody on #scheme actually held my hand (metaphorically) to clear my confusion as to which function is the "main" function where execution starts. I used code a little in C/C++/Java and was expecting a function named "main" even though I was testing individual functions from the DrScheme IDE's split window REPL.

motxilo 16y ago
I find rather amusing that lispers and schemers differ that much when it comes to lend a hand to people, especially when Scheme is a dialect of Lisp. Do lispers regard the poor schemers in an envious way just because tail-call optimization is part of the Scheme standard? :) No, seriously. Nowadays, it seems like people sometimes forget what they struggled with when they were learning the ropes of some technology.

blue1 16y ago

Never had any problem with the CL community. You often get really good and extensive replies, provided you don't ask questions before connecting the brain.