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I see no reason to spend a lot of time learning Common Lisp at this point. The Clojure community is helpful, because everyone is so excited to have a Lisp they
by tfincannon 17y ago
I see no reason to spend a lot of time learning Common Lisp at this point. The Clojure community is helpful, because everyone is so excited to have a Lisp they can really use. Stuart Halloway's book is a good enough introduction to Lisp concepts that one could go on to the more academic books to learn more. The book consistently takes pains to show idiomatic Clojure--a good first step away from the Java/C/C++ mindset. The core syntax of Clojure has been stable for several months now, and the implementation itself has been stable for much longer.
Learning Scheme just to read SICP (for instance) isn't necessary either. Since Clojure is a Lisp-1, it works well for the exercises in a Scheme-based book.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- mahmud 17y agoI will not argue the merits of CL since I would be biased, but Scheme? Clojure is no scheme. It can barely do tail recursion cleanly without resorting to a keyword (recur?) Scheme, along with Mozart/OZ are the perfect candidates for delivering programming skills without platform obstruction. Admittedly, it would take an specific implementation Scheme, a large and feature-rich one, to properly introduce someone to the real powers of Lisp. Go thorough a series of complete Lisp systems, say MIT Scheme and CMUCL, and see what a complete Lisp system looks like.