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I really liked Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel ( https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ ) however, ignore the environment setup: the

I really liked Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel ( https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ ) however, ignore the environment setup: the recommendations it makes are no longer maintained, these days Portacle is the best way to get started. One thing I really like about this book is it assumes you know basic programming ideas, so it gets into distinctively “lispy” features relatively quickly. The chapters on exception handling and Common Lisp’s object system, in particular, really sort of blew my mind and had a fairly profound influence on the way I think about programming languages.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
Hmm, maybe this isn’t the best for PLT: for that, I’d recommend the Art of the Metaobject Protocol which is a really interesting case study in the design of the implementation of a fairly complex part of the CL standard.
susam 6y ago
> I really liked Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel ( https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ ) however, ignore the environment setup: the recommendations it makes are no longer maintained, these days Portacle is the best way to get started.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 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 The outdated environment setup in the book can indeed be a genuine hurdle for a beginner.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 way to get started. In the CLPC repository though, we are documenting the steps to set up Emacs, SLIME, etc. from scratch, so that a beginner to the CL ecosystem can try out and understand the traditional way of installing and setting up these tools. If anyone here comes across this comment and is already reading or about to start reading the book Practical Common Lisp, or is eager to learn Common Lisp, you are welcome to visit https://github.com/spxy/clpc https://github.com/spxy/clpc and join the Common Lisp Programming Challenge.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  Yeah, it's all tradeoffs, Portacle has the advantage of not requiring you to learn emacs as much to learn Common Lisp.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago

Hmm, maybe this isn’t the best for PLT: for that, I’d recommend the Art of the Metaobject Protocol which is a really interesting case study in the design of the implementation of a fairly complex part of the CL standard.

susam 6y ago

> I really liked Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel ( https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ 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 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 way to get started. In the CLPC repository though, we are documenting the steps to set up Emacs, SLIME, etc. from scratch, so that a beginner to the CL ecosystem can try out and understand the traditional way of installing and setting up these tools. If anyone here comes across this comment and is already reading or about to start reading the book Practical Common Lisp, or is eager to learn Common Lisp, you are welcome to visit https://github.com/spxy/clpc https://github.com/spxy/clpc and join the Common Lisp Programming Challenge.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
Yeah, it's all tradeoffs, Portacle has the advantage of not requiring you to learn emacs as much to learn Common Lisp.