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The way is Scheme -> Common Lisp -> Arc. Scheme comes first because it is more refined and there are excellent courses and books. CS61A probably the best intr

The way is Scheme -> Common Lisp -> Arc. Scheme comes first because it is more refined and there are excellent courses and books. CS61A probably the best introductory course. After that it is good to watch original SICP lectures by the two magicians and read the book. Then it is necessary to take a look at what HtDP team is teaching. After this there will be no trouble with Common Lisp. Classic books are these by pg and Norvig. CLtL is just a reference. Then, with all the knowledge so far one could understand arc.arc and appreciate what have been done there.) With this background you will understand what Clojure really is and why, or what is Haskell, and why there is nothing special in it. btw, there is a brilliant course by Dan Grossman on coursera covering FP. He is very clever and consistent. After this you will smile at Haskell guys.) Update: I forgot Emacs Lisp. An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp is an excellent book that covers all the basic principles and gives a perspective how to use lisp in a real-world project.)

programminggeek 14y ago
When you say there is nothing special in it, do you mean Clojure or Haskell?
- dschiptsov 14y ago
  The later.
  - programminggeek 14y ago
    Ok, thanks!
  - Someone 14y ago
    <pedantic class='educational'> So, you mean Clojure? :-) I guess English is not your native language. http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/latergloss.htm http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/latergloss.htm: Use later when referring to time. Use latter when referring to the second of two persons or things mentioned previously. So, grammatically, 'the later' would refer to the language that was created later, and that's Clojure. </pedantic>
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
nnq 14y ago
Why do you think it would be bad to just start with Clojure as a "first Lisp"? (yeah, there's the JVM, but leiningen makes things bearable and lighttable is a one-click repl to "just start coding")
- dschiptsov 14y ago
  Because, in my opinion, Clojure isn't a Lisp. It is Lisp-like language, or Java with parenthesis and immutable collections, if you wish. It violates few basic principles of Lisp - one common underlying list-structure for code and data (Clojure's code is a mix of different containers) It violates a general evaluation rule - one for every expression with a very few special forms, etc. I cannot explain it in a few sentences, I have tried few times, but I'm sure that it is better to learn the classic Lisps first, so you could be able to appreciate their elegance and simplicity (a few selected ideas put together) and then you could compare it with what you have in Clojure. It is also important to learn how Lisp programmers used to build almost everything they wish out of conses (except arrays and hash-tables, of course) how they reason about access patterns for list structures, learn simple and elegant classic functions, such as map, filter, reduce, etc in their natural environment.) It short, compared with even CL Clojure is a mess.
  - pnathan 14y ago
    I upvoted this because I agree. I just spent about a week writing an app in Clojure, and it doesn't feel entirely like something in the Lisp Way[1]. That doesn't make it wrong, bad, immoral, etc; it is different. It has some interesting ideas which I think should be fed back into other Lispy languages via libraries (easy parallelism, immutability). [1] This is the hard to explain part.
    - chc 14y ago
      The idea that Lisp 1, Typed Racket, Dylan and Common Lisp are all Lisp but Clojure is not seems really weird to me. It feels like up till the '80s, Lisp was free to make progress and differences were embraced (even if that embracing was of the form "My Lisp is superior because of its differences from yours!"), but now any progress makes you "not Lisp." From people's consistent inability to articulate a meaningful distinction, I'm almost convinced that the idea of Clojure as "not really Lisp" is mostly a distaste for having reader support for vectors instead of requiring you to write (vector thing1 thing2) like most Lisps would. Yes, Clojure isn't exactly like older Lisps. Why should it be? Those Lisps are all different from each other as well. If new Lisps can't introduce new ideas, what is the point?
Locke1689 14y ago
I have no idea what you're talking about. Grossman's course is barely covering an introduction to programming languages (literally, the course my sophomore year of college covering the same material was called "introduction to programming languages"). I guess you could say that there's nothing "special" about Haskell, but the same would be true of Arc. I think Racket is the real champion in Arc -- a truly flexible programming language laboratory.
- kyllo 14y ago
  Yeah, Grossman's course covers SML, Racket, and Ruby. Haskell is not even part of the course at all.
- dschiptsov 14y ago
  His course covers the ideas behind so-called functional programming paradigm - high-order functions , environments, lexical scooping, closures and the standard idioms, including currying and lazyness. This course about concepts behind programming languages, not languages themselves.
  - Locke1689 14y ago
    Yeah. That's an introduction. You basically didn't mention anything that wasn't covered in the untyped lambda calculus at the beginning of the last century.
    - dschiptsov 14y ago
      Yeah, but that is enough for computers to work.) Inside a computer everything is a number - sometimes a number represent itself, sometimes it is a pointer (a number of a byte, an offset) and sometimes it is a code, a number of an unicode character, etc. The key idea there is that a pointer points to everything, value has a type, not a pointer. There are no pointers-to-integers along with pointers-to-booleans and pointers-to-strings. There are only numbers here. Having one kind of pointer for all is the semantics of untyped lamda calculus. We could cons everything with everything, we could have heterogeneous lists, tuples, whatever. Well, it seems that untyped lambda calculus are good-enough.) Perfection is achieved when there is nothing to remove, and not adding features is sometimes more wise.
nnq 14y ago
* sidenote: CS61A is Python based from 2011 on
mej10 14y ago
Can you expand on "or what is Haskell, and why there is nothing special in it" ?
tikhonj 14y ago
The idea that there is nothing special about Haskell, or that Haskell is all that closely related to lisp, is patently absurd. Haskell comes from a different, more mathematical background with a much more extensive underlying theory than lisp. I actually came from the background you advocate--61A (which really was an awesome class) was my first CS course in college. (Unfortunately, they have since ruined it.) I certainly appreciate lisp and have actually used Racket in a practical setting. That said, I've found Haskell and OCaml to stand out both from purely pragmatic and theoretical considerations. Haskell is the only moderately popular language that lets you control side-effects globally. That by itself is extremely special. This makes writing maintainable code easier and gives the compiler considerable freedom in optimizing code. Haskell has an incredible but also surprisingly simple type system. You can't just ignore that. There is nothing in lisp--not even typed Racket--that even comes close to Haskell's type system. Even aside from language qualities that make Haskell special--which I haven't even come close to covering--it also stands out because of its community. Not only is the community particularly nice and welcoming, it's also special in not being afraid of a bit of math. This doesn't mean you as a programmer have to know much math, but it does mean libraries tend to be simpler and more self-consistent because they rely on very well defined mathematical abstractions with simple algebraic rules. These abstractions also allow for significantly more general code. Haskell comes from a different theoretical background and philosophy than lisp. It has different practical advantages and a very different philosophy. So claiming that it's nothing special and that you will understand all of it just coming from lisp is completely wrong.
- Locke1689 14y ago
  I agree with much of what you wrote there but you should remember that the single most distinguishing feature of Haskell (aside from its predecessor Miranda) is laziness. Almost everything unique you described about Haskell was not accidental, but necessary to build a wholly lazy language.
  - BystanderX 14y ago
    From reading what Haskell related articles I've seen around HN and other places over the last few months, the always-on laziness seems to actually be a problem a chunk of the time, correct? Well, not so much a problem, as not always a good thing.

programminggeek 14y ago

When you say there is nothing special in it, do you mean Clojure or Haskell?

dschiptsov 14y ago
The later.
- programminggeek 14y ago
  Ok, thanks!
- Someone 14y ago
  <pedantic class='educational'> So, you mean Clojure? :-) I guess English is not your native language. http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/latergloss.htm http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/latergloss.htm: Use later when referring to time. Use latter when referring to the second of two persons or things mentioned previously. So, grammatically, 'the later' would refer to the language that was created later, and that's Clojure. </pedantic>

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

nnq 14y ago

Why do you think it would be bad to just start with Clojure as a "first Lisp"? (yeah, there's the JVM, but leiningen makes things bearable and lighttable is a one-click repl to "just start coding")

dschiptsov 14y ago
Because, in my opinion, Clojure isn't a Lisp. It is Lisp-like language, or Java with parenthesis and immutable collections, if you wish. It violates few basic principles of Lisp - one common underlying list-structure for code and data (Clojure's code is a mix of different containers) It violates a general evaluation rule - one for every expression with a very few special forms, etc. I cannot explain it in a few sentences, I have tried few times, but I'm sure that it is better to learn the classic Lisps first, so you could be able to appreciate their elegance and simplicity (a few selected ideas put together) and then you could compare it with what you have in Clojure. It is also important to learn how Lisp programmers used to build almost everything they wish out of conses (except arrays and hash-tables, of course) how they reason about access patterns for list structures, learn simple and elegant classic functions, such as map, filter, reduce, etc in their natural environment.) It short, compared with even CL Clojure is a mess.
- pnathan 14y ago
  I upvoted this because I agree. I just spent about a week writing an app in Clojure, and it doesn't feel entirely like something in the Lisp Way[1]. That doesn't make it wrong, bad, immoral, etc; it is different. It has some interesting ideas which I think should be fed back into other Lispy languages via libraries (easy parallelism, immutability). [1] This is the hard to explain part.
  - chc 14y ago
    The idea that Lisp 1, Typed Racket, Dylan and Common Lisp are all Lisp but Clojure is not seems really weird to me. It feels like up till the '80s, Lisp was free to make progress and differences were embraced (even if that embracing was of the form "My Lisp is superior because of its differences from yours!"), but now any progress makes you "not Lisp." From people's consistent inability to articulate a meaningful distinction, I'm almost convinced that the idea of Clojure as "not really Lisp" is mostly a distaste for having reader support for vectors instead of requiring you to write (vector thing1 thing2) like most Lisps would. Yes, Clojure isn't exactly like older Lisps. Why should it be? Those Lisps are all different from each other as well. If new Lisps can't introduce new ideas, what is the point?

Locke1689 14y ago

I have no idea what you're talking about. Grossman's course is barely covering an introduction to programming languages (literally, the course my sophomore year of college covering the same material was called "introduction to programming languages"). I guess you could say that there's nothing "special" about Haskell, but the same would be true of Arc. I think Racket is the real champion in Arc -- a truly flexible programming language laboratory.

kyllo 14y ago
Yeah, Grossman's course covers SML, Racket, and Ruby. Haskell is not even part of the course at all.
dschiptsov 14y ago
His course covers the ideas behind so-called functional programming paradigm - high-order functions , environments, lexical scooping, closures and the standard idioms, including currying and lazyness. This course about concepts behind programming languages, not languages themselves.
- Locke1689 14y ago
  Yeah. That's an introduction. You basically didn't mention anything that wasn't covered in the untyped lambda calculus at the beginning of the last century.
  - dschiptsov 14y ago
    Yeah, but that is enough for computers to work.) Inside a computer everything is a number - sometimes a number represent itself, sometimes it is a pointer (a number of a byte, an offset) and sometimes it is a code, a number of an unicode character, etc. The key idea there is that a pointer points to everything, value has a type, not a pointer. There are no pointers-to-integers along with pointers-to-booleans and pointers-to-strings. There are only numbers here. Having one kind of pointer for all is the semantics of untyped lamda calculus. We could cons everything with everything, we could have heterogeneous lists, tuples, whatever. Well, it seems that untyped lambda calculus are good-enough.) Perfection is achieved when there is nothing to remove, and not adding features is sometimes more wise.

nnq 14y ago

* sidenote: CS61A is Python based from 2011 on

mej10 14y ago

Can you expand on "or what is Haskell, and why there is nothing special in it" ?

tikhonj 14y ago

The idea that there is nothing special about Haskell, or that Haskell is all that closely related to lisp, is patently absurd. Haskell comes from a different, more mathematical background with a much more extensive underlying theory than lisp. I actually came from the background you advocate--61A (which really was an awesome class) was my first CS course in college. (Unfortunately, they have since ruined it.) I certainly appreciate lisp and have actually used Racket in a practical setting. That said, I've found Haskell and OCaml to stand out both from purely pragmatic and theoretical considerations. Haskell is the only moderately popular language that lets you control side-effects globally. That by itself is extremely special. This makes writing maintainable code easier and gives the compiler considerable freedom in optimizing code. Haskell has an incredible but also surprisingly simple type system. You can't just ignore that. There is nothing in lisp--not even typed Racket--that even comes close to Haskell's type system. Even aside from language qualities that make Haskell special--which I haven't even come close to covering--it also stands out because of its community. Not only is the community particularly nice and welcoming, it's also special in not being afraid of a bit of math. This doesn't mean you as a programmer have to know much math, but it does mean libraries tend to be simpler and more self-consistent because they rely on very well defined mathematical abstractions with simple algebraic rules. These abstractions also allow for significantly more general code. Haskell comes from a different theoretical background and philosophy than lisp. It has different practical advantages and a very different philosophy. So claiming that it's nothing special and that you will understand all of it just coming from lisp is completely wrong.

Locke1689 14y ago
I agree with much of what you wrote there but you should remember that the single most distinguishing feature of Haskell (aside from its predecessor Miranda) is laziness. Almost everything unique you described about Haskell was not accidental, but necessary to build a wholly lazy language.
- BystanderX 14y ago
  From reading what Haskell related articles I've seen around HN and other places over the last few months, the always-on laziness seems to actually be a problem a chunk of the time, correct? Well, not so much a problem, as not always a good thing.