6 ms·

I have heard for decades how Lisp is transformative, how just having learned it, even if you leave, you will never look at things the same way again. Like havi

I have heard for decades how Lisp is transformative, how just having learned it, even if you leave, you will never look at things the same way again. Like having served in the Armed Forces. Every so often I get interested in Lisp, but I always run up against the same conflicts. I look for something that I can run in Windows that has a reasonable set of libraries and then immediately stumble upon the Crusades. You know, the religious wars you saw with emacs vs vi, wars that used to be fought over various Linux distros and window managers, that you will now see about different flavors of agile or whatever. I am quite sure that there are religious wars being fought in the territories of Javascript frameworks that I've never heard of. These wars so often seem to leave the territories barren, the original objectives cloudy, and the participants scarred. What was this good for, again? Anyway, every time I encounter these things I end up asking myself if I have the knowledge to pick a side in whatever war and if joining up is going to actually provide a solution to the problems I wanted to solve using programming, decide I am neither fit nor armed, and back slowly out of the room.

zaphar 6y ago
Ignore the war. Just pick a lisp, any lisp, and then learn it. It's not necessary to pick a side nor does it really matter which lisp you pick. You can pick a side later if you feel the religious fervor sweeping you up. But really Lisp is sufficiently different from pretty much any language you'll have encountered that it's worth taking a look.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  No, I do not worry about feeling fervor. I tend to be intensely repelled whenever I detect that sort of thing in others. I must select a side because I have to install something. The problem I have had with this approach is that, through the clouds of dust and smoke, through the constant shelling and the screams of the dying, I cannot seem to discern which side has that bare minimum set of properties that I want. Namely, can run on Windows without it being a ridiculous exercise in hackery, comes with a robust set of libraries that I can end up using it to solve actual problems I might eventually receive money for solving, and has enough study material to lead me through it. None of these are negotiable to me and as far as I can tell, these objectives haven't even been considered by the various sides in this forever war. And so I will do what I always have done, which is take a peek, observe the chaos, and then wait another five years to see if anything has gotten any better. I did the whole "enlightenment" thing once with Prolog. It ended up not having any impact on anything I wrote. The enlightenment wasn't portable. I could not use it to solve actual problems I had. I could use it to solve toy problems in a toy world, and maybe there are spots where it could have overlapped with a part of the world I wasn't in, but I wasn't going to migrate just to find a way to get paid using Prolog. At the end of the day, I was still chopping wood and carrying water.
  - w3mmpp 6y ago
    Go with Emacs + Slime + SBCL, they're very stable on windows, then install Quicklisp: https://www.quicklisp.org/beta https://www.quicklisp.org/beta and you're good to go.
  - krapp 6y ago
    >Namely, can run on Windows without it being a ridiculous exercise in hackery, comes with a robust set of libraries that I can end up using it to solve actual problems I might eventually receive money for solving, and has enough study material to lead me through it. Racket seems to tick all of your boxes, IMO. Also maybe Clojure. I've gotten both to work without much problem on Windows, both have an ecosystem and plenty of tutorials.
- int_19h 6y ago
  If the dialect of Lisp picked does not have full-fledged macros, then it's not really sufficiently different from many other languages.
  - zaphar 6y ago
    All you really need is quoting and eval to get something close enough to macros. Most Lisp dialects will have that much.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      If you consider that to be sufficient, then what difference is there compared to any other language with eval?
      - zaphar 6y ago
        It's about ergonomics. Technically if I'm willing to grab a library to parse the AST and hook into the compiler/interpreter backend then I can replicate what Lisp let's me do in any language that exists. But there is a pretty wide gap between how easy that is in say... C++ as opposed to Lisp. Some languages get a lot closer than others but I would argue that with the exception of Forth or perhaps TCL none of them make it anywhere near as easy Lisp does.
        int_19h 6y ago
        The line between "language" and "library" can be very blurry - it certainly is in case of Lisp. Suppose we take something like Python, which has a standard library module to parse ASTs, modify them, and eval them. It might look a tad more ugly than Lisp (esp. with quoting and unquoting), but I don't see why this should be considered a fundamental difference, enough so to justify its use as the sole determining factor of a "true Lisp". And besides, what about popular languages that do have full-fledged macros? Say, Rust or D.
        zaphar 6y ago
kerkeslager 6y ago
I'm saddened by your story. Our programming communities can be more welcoming. That said, I think these debates are necessary. Fixing problems starts with deciding what the problems actually are. The problem isn't that the debates are happening, it's that people like you are getting dragged into them. You aren't obligated to participate in debates. Nor do you have to use the absolute best version of Lisp to get most of the benefits. My advice is to pick up a copy of MIT Scheme (works on Windows) and then work through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), and don't read anything else about Lisp until you're done, because you don't need to. MIT Scheme isn't the best Lisp. It's just the Lisp that's used in SICP. You won't win any debates arguing that MIT Scheme is the best Lisp. You might even hear people say MIT Scheme isn't even a Lisp. I agree with some of that, but those debates are irrelevant to your learning. Feel free to hit me up with any questions. I certainly have opinions on all the holy wars, but I won't bring them up, I'll just help you with the task you're working on. :) I'm not a Lisp expert by any means, but I've worked through most of SICP.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  I’d advise using Racket to get up and going.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    Agreed, specifically the the SICP #lang: https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/SICP_Language.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/SICP_Language.html
  - peatmoss 6y ago
    I did a lot of lisp bouncing, and am still what I’d call a mediocre novice. However the two lisps I found the most traction with were Clojure and Racket. With Clojure, I liked the data structures, availability of libraries, and syntactic sugar. With Racket I feel like I got something almost as comfortable as Clojure, but without the baggage of the JVM (yes, I know the JVM is amazing—I still find it a pain). The Racket documentation is pretty good. The guide, the reference, and the How to Design Programs beginning programming book all contribute something. I dabbled in How to Design Programs way back when I was learning R, and it certainly shaped the way I approached R... even infected my Python thinking a little.
scottlocklin 6y ago
I dunno, Lisp is OK. I enjoyed my time with it. The problem with it is, while it may give feelings of transcendent power to the programmer, its real world deployed results are rather lacking, compared to such boring languages as golang, java and so on; or even more obscure ones like Ada or (trolling hard now, but true) Forth. From this alone, it is abundantly obvious its advocates are overstating its utility in solving problems. The most obvious products of the Lisp world are computer algebra systems such as Reduce, Axiom and Macsyma, and these are all very old pieces of software, rather than something new and interesting used by millions. In fact, you might say the purpose of Lisp is to write the kinds of custom interpreter/compiler expert system/symbolic manipulation systems that people used to think were going to be "AI" in the 1970s. Sure, our host made his fortune developing in Lisp; he might have done so using some other language. The most obvious lisp projects today are people .... developing new lisp dialects. I'm sure there are plenty of profitable projects in Lisp, just as there are in Delphi, APL and other older non-mainstream languages. But if Lisp were really all that amazing for building useful things, considering the number of people with a smattering of it, it would be used more often. Or at least you'd see more real world results from the Lisp community than you do. Anyway, pick one up; it's a lot of fun, and it does change your views as to what is possible in terms of communicating with your computer.

zaphar 6y ago

Ignore the war. Just pick a lisp, any lisp, and then learn it. It's not necessary to pick a side nor does it really matter which lisp you pick. You can pick a side later if you feel the religious fervor sweeping you up. But really Lisp is sufficiently different from pretty much any language you'll have encountered that it's worth taking a look.

at_a_remove 6y ago
No, I do not worry about feeling fervor. I tend to be intensely repelled whenever I detect that sort of thing in others. I must select a side because I have to install something. The problem I have had with this approach is that, through the clouds of dust and smoke, through the constant shelling and the screams of the dying, I cannot seem to discern which side has that bare minimum set of properties that I want. Namely, can run on Windows without it being a ridiculous exercise in hackery, comes with a robust set of libraries that I can end up using it to solve actual problems I might eventually receive money for solving, and has enough study material to lead me through it. None of these are negotiable to me and as far as I can tell, these objectives haven't even been considered by the various sides in this forever war. And so I will do what I always have done, which is take a peek, observe the chaos, and then wait another five years to see if anything has gotten any better. I did the whole "enlightenment" thing once with Prolog. It ended up not having any impact on anything I wrote. The enlightenment wasn't portable. I could not use it to solve actual problems I had. I could use it to solve toy problems in a toy world, and maybe there are spots where it could have overlapped with a part of the world I wasn't in, but I wasn't going to migrate just to find a way to get paid using Prolog. At the end of the day, I was still chopping wood and carrying water.
- w3mmpp 6y ago
  Go with Emacs + Slime + SBCL, they're very stable on windows, then install Quicklisp: https://www.quicklisp.org/beta https://www.quicklisp.org/beta and you're good to go.
- krapp 6y ago
  >Namely, can run on Windows without it being a ridiculous exercise in hackery, comes with a robust set of libraries that I can end up using it to solve actual problems I might eventually receive money for solving, and has enough study material to lead me through it. Racket seems to tick all of your boxes, IMO. Also maybe Clojure. I've gotten both to work without much problem on Windows, both have an ecosystem and plenty of tutorials.
int_19h 6y ago
If the dialect of Lisp picked does not have full-fledged macros, then it's not really sufficiently different from many other languages.
- zaphar 6y ago
  All you really need is quoting and eval to get something close enough to macros. Most Lisp dialects will have that much.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    If you consider that to be sufficient, then what difference is there compared to any other language with eval?
    - zaphar 6y ago
      It's about ergonomics. Technically if I'm willing to grab a library to parse the AST and hook into the compiler/interpreter backend then I can replicate what Lisp let's me do in any language that exists. But there is a pretty wide gap between how easy that is in say... C++ as opposed to Lisp. Some languages get a lot closer than others but I would argue that with the exception of Forth or perhaps TCL none of them make it anywhere near as easy Lisp does.
      - int_19h 6y ago
        The line between "language" and "library" can be very blurry - it certainly is in case of Lisp. Suppose we take something like Python, which has a standard library module to parse ASTs, modify them, and eval them. It might look a tad more ugly than Lisp (esp. with quoting and unquoting), but I don't see why this should be considered a fundamental difference, enough so to justify its use as the sole determining factor of a "true Lisp". And besides, what about popular languages that do have full-fledged macros? Say, Rust or D.
        zaphar 6y ago

kerkeslager 6y ago

I'm saddened by your story. Our programming communities can be more welcoming. That said, I think these debates are necessary. Fixing problems starts with deciding what the problems actually are. The problem isn't that the debates are happening, it's that people like you are getting dragged into them. You aren't obligated to participate in debates. Nor do you have to use the absolute best version of Lisp to get most of the benefits. My advice is to pick up a copy of MIT Scheme (works on Windows) and then work through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), and don't read anything else about Lisp until you're done, because you don't need to. MIT Scheme isn't the best Lisp. It's just the Lisp that's used in SICP. You won't win any debates arguing that MIT Scheme is the best Lisp. You might even hear people say MIT Scheme isn't even a Lisp. I agree with some of that, but those debates are irrelevant to your learning. Feel free to hit me up with any questions. I certainly have opinions on all the holy wars, but I won't bring them up, I'll just help you with the task you're working on. :) I'm not a Lisp expert by any means, but I've worked through most of SICP.

threatofrain 6y ago
I’d advise using Racket to get up and going.
- catalogia 6y ago
  Agreed, specifically the the SICP #lang: https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/SICP_Language.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/SICP_Language.html
- peatmoss 6y ago
  I did a lot of lisp bouncing, and am still what I’d call a mediocre novice. However the two lisps I found the most traction with were Clojure and Racket. With Clojure, I liked the data structures, availability of libraries, and syntactic sugar. With Racket I feel like I got something almost as comfortable as Clojure, but without the baggage of the JVM (yes, I know the JVM is amazing—I still find it a pain). The Racket documentation is pretty good. The guide, the reference, and the How to Design Programs beginning programming book all contribute something. I dabbled in How to Design Programs way back when I was learning R, and it certainly shaped the way I approached R... even infected my Python thinking a little.

scottlocklin 6y ago

I dunno, Lisp is OK. I enjoyed my time with it. The problem with it is, while it may give feelings of transcendent power to the programmer, its real world deployed results are rather lacking, compared to such boring languages as golang, java and so on; or even more obscure ones like Ada or (trolling hard now, but true) Forth. From this alone, it is abundantly obvious its advocates are overstating its utility in solving problems. The most obvious products of the Lisp world are computer algebra systems such as Reduce, Axiom and Macsyma, and these are all very old pieces of software, rather than something new and interesting used by millions. In fact, you might say the purpose of Lisp is to write the kinds of custom interpreter/compiler expert system/symbolic manipulation systems that people used to think were going to be "AI" in the 1970s. Sure, our host made his fortune developing in Lisp; he might have done so using some other language. The most obvious lisp projects today are people .... developing new lisp dialects. I'm sure there are plenty of profitable projects in Lisp, just as there are in Delphi, APL and other older non-mainstream languages. But if Lisp were really all that amazing for building useful things, considering the number of people with a smattering of it, it would be used more often. Or at least you'd see more real world results from the Lisp community than you do. Anyway, pick one up; it's a lot of fun, and it does change your views as to what is possible in terms of communicating with your computer.