4 ms·

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 sta

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 expect. There's a part of me that almost wishes I'd started with a book that takes more of an approach of "programming is ultimately sequence, selection and iteration. Here's how you do sequence in Lisp. Here's how you do selection. Here's how you do iteration. Now here's all the Fancy Lisp Stuff™". The reason I say that, is because if you have at least the primitives for sequence, selection, and iteration (and maybe some I/O) in your mental toolbox, you can start building more or less arbitrary programs. With the PCL book structure you don't get to, for example, iteration, until moderately deep into the book. You do get there of course, but the early parts left me with an uneasy feeling like "geez, I don't even know how to write a loop in this language yet, when am I ever going to be able to just start coding in Lisp on my own?" if that makes sense. Possibly one could complement PCL with another book, or online materials, but so far I've mostly just been grinding through PCL and haven't looked at any other Lisp books. HTH.

ragnese 6y ago
This is a bit off-topic, but something you said resonated with me. > 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 expect. > > There's a part of me that almost wishes I'd started with a book that takes more of an approach of "programming is ultimately sequence, selection and iteration. Here's how you do sequence in Lisp. Here's how you do selection. Here's how you do iteration. Now here's all the Fancy Lisp Stuff™". I feel like I'm in the minority in that I prefer to NOT learn things by just "diving in". I am much more successful when I start from the absolute fundamentals. There are objective pros and cons to either approach, but I suspect the success factor is based on one's personality (or some such). If you start with the fundamentals, it's hard to know if you have any mastery until you try to do something "real". And then you might get frustrated because nobody taught you, e.g., how to do a network call in this programming language. It's also less rewarding because you can spend hours/days/weeks before actually "doing" anything. If you start by diving in to a project, it's hard to know if you're doing things "the right way" or if you're just porting over bad habits from some other language you're familiar with. Sure, I got it to work, but is it good, or did I just cement in some bad habits? The first time I drove a standard transmission car, I didn't stall it a single time. Because I read on the internet for a week about how car transmissions work and the difference between a manual and automatic gearbox. I do the same thing with programming languages. The first thing I want to know is what is the memory model approximately like (everything is a reference, values + references, are allocations cheap or expensive), what is the "philosophy" of the language (everything is an object, function composition is the blessed approach, mutability is bad, types are most/least important), etc. Then I want basic mechanisms: loops, iterators, lists or arrays, threads/futures/coroutines. Etc, etc. That being said, SICP is kind of nice in that it finds an interesting middle ground where you're definitely learning details of the scheme language (applicative order vs normal order, recursion, etc) while it also feels like the details of the language is not the entire point. No real point here. Just inspired by your comment and thought I'd share my own experience.
- susam 6y ago
  > I feel like I'm in the minority in that I prefer to NOT learn things by just "diving in". I am much more successful when I start from the absolute fundamentals. A bit more off-topic, but this resonated with me. I too feel more comfortable when I start with the absolute fundamentals. When something does not work, knowing the fundamentals helps me to reason about why it does not work from the first principles. On similar lines, I did a relevant "Show HN" post here today: Emacs4CL: https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl (35 lines of ~/.emacs to turn Emacs into Common Lisp dev environment) It bothers me a little when someone new to Common Lisp or Emacs is encouraged to start off with Portacle or Spacemacs directly without appreciating the extensibility of Emacs and how SLIME fits in the environment. The Show HN post on Emacs4CL I have linked to above is an attempt to promote a more DIY approach to setting up one's development environment for Common Lisp without having to spend a lot of time.
  - ragnese 6y ago
    Exactly. Though, to be fair, if someone says they want to learn LISP and then you tell them to learn Emacs... well, now they have TWO problems! xD I love and use Emacs. And I also, unsurprisingly, don't like or recommend that people start off with all of these "starter packs". But at the same time, if you don't already know Emacs and you want to learn LISP, I don't know what I'd recommend.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - susam 6y ago
      > But at the same time, if you don't already know Emacs and you want to learn LISP, I don't know what I'd recommend. Here is my attempt to make it easier to get started with vanilla Emacs + SLIME + SBCL without hiding the underlying details like a starter pack does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25440690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25440690
    - mjul 6y ago
      For Clojure, VSCode with the Calva and clj-kondo extensions installed is a pretty good, free starting point. Also, if you are used to the Jetbrains tools like IntelliJ, try the Cursive IDE (paid).
_ph_ 6y ago
Seconded. PCL ist in my eyes one of the best and most "modern" Common Lisp books around. SBCL is probably the best Common LIsp compiler and free on top of that. Paired with Slime and Emacs you have a professional development environment. I use it regularly.
nemoniac 6y ago
I wouldn't focus too much on "sequencing, selection, and iteration". That's only the start of it. It's how you think if you're programming Python or Java or C or whatever. With Lisp you can better think in terms of abstractions. In particular how do you do data abstraction, how do you do functional abstraction (that's the control flow: sequencing selection and iteration) and how do you do syntactic abstraction? That last one is where Lisp (any Lisp) really comes into its own. It's where you go beyond the expressiveness of those other programming languages. Whether you go with defmacro or define-syntax, it opens up a whole other world. And the expressiveness here isn't meant to suggest that you can write programs that you can't in other languages (they're all Turing complete) but that you can write new kinds of control flow and scoping constructs so you're not limited to the sequencing selection and iteration that the language provides.
- mindcrime 6y ago
  And the expressiveness here isn't meant to suggest that you can write programs that you can't in other languages (they're all Turing complete) but that you can write new kinds of control flow and scoping constructs so you're not limited to the sequencing selection and iteration that the language provides. That's all great... once you already know how to use the language. But, at least relative to the way I think and learn, I really want to quickly be able to do three or four things when learning a new language: sequence, selection, iteration, and console I/O. Once I can do that, I can write essentially any arbitrary program. And then I can start adding onto my knowledge and learning the more interesting ways of doing things. Maybe I'd have a different perspective if I'd learned Lisp first, instead of having 20+ years of programming in Algol derived languages under my belt first. But I do feel uncomfortable spending days and weeks with a language and not even learning how do use (their version of) a for loop or whatever.
defgeneric 6y ago
> Possibly one could complement PCL with another book I found a very good complement was Edi Weitz' "Common Lisp Recipes" from same the publisher. http://weitz.de/cl-recipes/ http://weitz.de/cl-recipes/
jjav 6y ago
> I installed SBCL, Slime for Emacs, and started working through the book Practical Common Lisp. This is exactly the approach I took (~15 years ago) when I went all-in on Lisp for a few years. Don't know if it is still the best today, but it was a solid approach at the time.

ragnese 6y ago

This is a bit off-topic, but something you said resonated with me. > 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 expect. > > There's a part of me that almost wishes I'd started with a book that takes more of an approach of "programming is ultimately sequence, selection and iteration. Here's how you do sequence in Lisp. Here's how you do selection. Here's how you do iteration. Now here's all the Fancy Lisp Stuff™". I feel like I'm in the minority in that I prefer to NOT learn things by just "diving in". I am much more successful when I start from the absolute fundamentals. There are objective pros and cons to either approach, but I suspect the success factor is based on one's personality (or some such). If you start with the fundamentals, it's hard to know if you have any mastery until you try to do something "real". And then you might get frustrated because nobody taught you, e.g., how to do a network call in this programming language. It's also less rewarding because you can spend hours/days/weeks before actually "doing" anything. If you start by diving in to a project, it's hard to know if you're doing things "the right way" or if you're just porting over bad habits from some other language you're familiar with. Sure, I got it to work, but is it good, or did I just cement in some bad habits? The first time I drove a standard transmission car, I didn't stall it a single time. Because I read on the internet for a week about how car transmissions work and the difference between a manual and automatic gearbox. I do the same thing with programming languages. The first thing I want to know is what is the memory model approximately like (everything is a reference, values + references, are allocations cheap or expensive), what is the "philosophy" of the language (everything is an object, function composition is the blessed approach, mutability is bad, types are most/least important), etc. Then I want basic mechanisms: loops, iterators, lists or arrays, threads/futures/coroutines. Etc, etc. That being said, SICP is kind of nice in that it finds an interesting middle ground where you're definitely learning details of the scheme language (applicative order vs normal order, recursion, etc) while it also feels like the details of the language is not the entire point. No real point here. Just inspired by your comment and thought I'd share my own experience.

susam 6y ago
> I feel like I'm in the minority in that I prefer to NOT learn things by just "diving in". I am much more successful when I start from the absolute fundamentals. A bit more off-topic, but this resonated with me. I too feel more comfortable when I start with the absolute fundamentals. When something does not work, knowing the fundamentals helps me to reason about why it does not work from the first principles. On similar lines, I did a relevant "Show HN" post here today: Emacs4CL: https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl (35 lines of ~/.emacs to turn Emacs into Common Lisp dev environment) It bothers me a little when someone new to Common Lisp or Emacs is encouraged to start off with Portacle or Spacemacs directly without appreciating the extensibility of Emacs and how SLIME fits in the environment. The Show HN post on Emacs4CL I have linked to above is an attempt to promote a more DIY approach to setting up one's development environment for Common Lisp without having to spend a lot of time.
- ragnese 6y ago
  Exactly. Though, to be fair, if someone says they want to learn LISP and then you tell them to learn Emacs... well, now they have TWO problems! xD I love and use Emacs. And I also, unsurprisingly, don't like or recommend that people start off with all of these "starter packs". But at the same time, if you don't already know Emacs and you want to learn LISP, I don't know what I'd recommend.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - susam 6y ago
    > But at the same time, if you don't already know Emacs and you want to learn LISP, I don't know what I'd recommend. Here is my attempt to make it easier to get started with vanilla Emacs + SLIME + SBCL without hiding the underlying details like a starter pack does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25440690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25440690
  - mjul 6y ago
    For Clojure, VSCode with the Calva and clj-kondo extensions installed is a pretty good, free starting point. Also, if you are used to the Jetbrains tools like IntelliJ, try the Cursive IDE (paid).

_ph_ 6y ago

Seconded. PCL ist in my eyes one of the best and most "modern" Common Lisp books around. SBCL is probably the best Common LIsp compiler and free on top of that. Paired with Slime and Emacs you have a professional development environment. I use it regularly.

nemoniac 6y ago

I wouldn't focus too much on "sequencing, selection, and iteration". That's only the start of it. It's how you think if you're programming Python or Java or C or whatever. With Lisp you can better think in terms of abstractions. In particular how do you do data abstraction, how do you do functional abstraction (that's the control flow: sequencing selection and iteration) and how do you do syntactic abstraction? That last one is where Lisp (any Lisp) really comes into its own. It's where you go beyond the expressiveness of those other programming languages. Whether you go with defmacro or define-syntax, it opens up a whole other world. And the expressiveness here isn't meant to suggest that you can write programs that you can't in other languages (they're all Turing complete) but that you can write new kinds of control flow and scoping constructs so you're not limited to the sequencing selection and iteration that the language provides.

mindcrime 6y ago
And the expressiveness here isn't meant to suggest that you can write programs that you can't in other languages (they're all Turing complete) but that you can write new kinds of control flow and scoping constructs so you're not limited to the sequencing selection and iteration that the language provides. That's all great... once you already know how to use the language. But, at least relative to the way I think and learn, I really want to quickly be able to do three or four things when learning a new language: sequence, selection, iteration, and console I/O. Once I can do that, I can write essentially any arbitrary program. And then I can start adding onto my knowledge and learning the more interesting ways of doing things. Maybe I'd have a different perspective if I'd learned Lisp first, instead of having 20+ years of programming in Algol derived languages under my belt first. But I do feel uncomfortable spending days and weeks with a language and not even learning how do use (their version of) a for loop or whatever.

defgeneric 6y ago

> Possibly one could complement PCL with another book I found a very good complement was Edi Weitz' "Common Lisp Recipes" from same the publisher. http://weitz.de/cl-recipes/ http://weitz.de/cl-recipes/

jjav 6y ago

> I installed SBCL, Slime for Emacs, and started working through the book Practical Common Lisp. This is exactly the approach I took (~15 years ago) when I went all-in on Lisp for a few years. Don't know if it is still the best today, but it was a solid approach at the time.