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I'd advise exactly the opposite. While clojure and racket are excellent languages, they are very different from one another and CL. Telling someone to learn pyt

I'd advise exactly the opposite. While clojure and racket are excellent languages, they are very different from one another and CL. Telling someone to learn python or ruby if they ask about learning lua isn't a good advice, is it?

eru 13y ago
Oh, if your goal is to learn one of the Lisps, then don't spend any time on Common Lisp. It's old and ugly. Similar, if someone asked about a modern scripting language, I'd send them away from Perl in favour of Python or Ruby. If they goal was explicitly Perl (or Common Lisp) that would be a different thing, though.
- serf 13y ago
  >>Oh, if your goal is to learn one of the Lisps, then don't spend any time on Common Lisp. It's old and ugly. why? I don't find that at all, and a large reason for learning common lisp is as a learning exercise to become more intimately familiar with lambda calculus and s-expressions. The increased expressivity of clojure (for example) may hinder the very thought processes that make lisp a dialect worth learning. Of course they are both fine languages, but most people now advocate the learning of a LISP not for practicalities sake, but rather just to demonstrate real life things that those sets of languages do differently than nearly every other language, and to allow the programmer to take from those experiences and apply them to their language of choice. From THAT standpoint, i'd advocate CL first, if not only for forcing the user of the language to experience the follies of certain practices, such as the namespace issues that Clojure tried to fix about CL.
  - klibertp 13y ago
    > as a learning exercise to become more intimately familiar with lambda calculus and s-expressions Any Scheme implementation will be better for this. Much less primitives, one namespace for everything, hygienic macros, immutablity by default/encouraged. CL is exactly the opposite of that - it's complicated because it wants to be practical. And for the most part it is. It supports procedural, functional and OO programming, probably logic programming too with the right library. It's designed as a real system for solving real problems - and as such is not the best tool for learning about lambda calculus. Actually you could program imperatively in CL for the long time before ever feeling awkward. Scheme, with it's mandatory TCO and encouraged immutability is much better for learning lambda calculus... and about Lisp in general.
- pavelludiq 13y ago
  Bullshit! In many ways Common Lisp is still a much better language than Clojure or Racket. It isn't old, compared to pretty much anything from the 80's it has aged unbelievably well, and while it has some "stale" parts you can call ugly, I find many parts of clojure or racket much uglier. All in all, it is one of the best high level languages around.
  - cgag 13y ago
    Can you give some examples of those ways?

eru 13y ago

Oh, if your goal is to learn one of the Lisps, then don't spend any time on Common Lisp. It's old and ugly. Similar, if someone asked about a modern scripting language, I'd send them away from Perl in favour of Python or Ruby. If they goal was explicitly Perl (or Common Lisp) that would be a different thing, though.

serf 13y ago
>>Oh, if your goal is to learn one of the Lisps, then don't spend any time on Common Lisp. It's old and ugly. why? I don't find that at all, and a large reason for learning common lisp is as a learning exercise to become more intimately familiar with lambda calculus and s-expressions. The increased expressivity of clojure (for example) may hinder the very thought processes that make lisp a dialect worth learning. Of course they are both fine languages, but most people now advocate the learning of a LISP not for practicalities sake, but rather just to demonstrate real life things that those sets of languages do differently than nearly every other language, and to allow the programmer to take from those experiences and apply them to their language of choice. From THAT standpoint, i'd advocate CL first, if not only for forcing the user of the language to experience the follies of certain practices, such as the namespace issues that Clojure tried to fix about CL.
- klibertp 13y ago
  > as a learning exercise to become more intimately familiar with lambda calculus and s-expressions Any Scheme implementation will be better for this. Much less primitives, one namespace for everything, hygienic macros, immutablity by default/encouraged. CL is exactly the opposite of that - it's complicated because it wants to be practical. And for the most part it is. It supports procedural, functional and OO programming, probably logic programming too with the right library. It's designed as a real system for solving real problems - and as such is not the best tool for learning about lambda calculus. Actually you could program imperatively in CL for the long time before ever feeling awkward. Scheme, with it's mandatory TCO and encouraged immutability is much better for learning lambda calculus... and about Lisp in general.
pavelludiq 13y ago
Bullshit! In many ways Common Lisp is still a much better language than Clojure or Racket. It isn't old, compared to pretty much anything from the 80's it has aged unbelievably well, and while it has some "stale" parts you can call ugly, I find many parts of clojure or racket much uglier. All in all, it is one of the best high level languages around.
- cgag 13y ago
  Can you give some examples of those ways?