I’ve been reading Steven Levy’s book, Hackers. The book has really reminded me of the thrill I got learning to program computers back in high school. I first discovered computers in junior high, when I found the school’s Apple II. This computer was used by an advanced math class I believe. Similar to Hackers, I hung out there even though I didn’t belong. I even tried to arrange borrowing it for the weekend. Somehow that didn’t happen. My family didn’t have much money so I couldn’t afford a real computer. Eventually though I got a TI-994A computer. It was kind of cool in that it was a computer which could also accept cartridges (ala Atari 2600). It had a tape drive which I used to store programs.
Anyway, I’ve reading Hackers which talks about Lisp programming. I also came across Paul Graham and his new Arc language (yet another Lisp spin-off). This has got me thinking I should learn Lisp again. In case you’re wondering, Paul Graham is the guy who thinks Lisp is best as compared to the popular Java/C# languages (Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham). I don’t agree with him, since I’m into Java, but of course, its not very informed since I’ve never done any serious Lisp programming. Back in the early 90’s, I played around with Emacs-Lisp since I was a heavy XEmacs user (I still use it). I still have Lisp 3rd edition by Winston and Horn. At the time I found the book not great at teaching me the language.
After coming across Lisp references again, I’ve got the Let’s Learn Lisp bug again. I went searching on Amazon for appropriate Lisp books and found that most Lisp books are old. That Lisp 3rd edition published in 1989 is still the most recent edition. Not too many good books. Paul Graham has published two well-reviewed books: ANSI Common Lisp and On Lisp: Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp. The latter book is available as a free download from his web-site.
The other question is which Lisp implementation to use. I found this survey but there does not seem to be one which says use me. If anyone has any suggestions on books or implementations to try, let me know.
March 4, 2008 at 12:07 pm |
You’re in luck – I wrote the answer to your post the day before you wrote it!
http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/how-to-learn-lisp/
If you know emacs already, you should use SLIME as an editor. There’s a good screencast for it, and I wrote a reference guide for it (and a SLIME cheat sheet):
http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/reference-for-the-slimelispemacs-screencast/
http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/public-beta-open-for-ultimate-n00b-slimeemacs-cheat-sheet/
As far as implementation goes, the short answer is: If you don’t mind paying, Allegro or Lispworks are great, well supported have lots of features, etc. If you want free/open source and you’re on Linux, use SBCL (seems to be most widely used). If you’re on Windows, use CLisp (best Windows support, but no threads). If you’re not sure which implementation to use, then you don’t care about any differences besides which one works best on your OS.
March 4, 2008 at 12:35 pm |
By all means, read “Practical Common Lisp” by Peter Siebel. It’s a recent book, and really good.
The book is also available online if you want to take a look. http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
March 4, 2008 at 2:29 pm |
I would recommend learning lisp just to get the added programming perspective.
In reply to some of your questions:
if just starting out, clisp is sufficient
http://clisp.cons.org/ (there’s some mac info there, too, on the front page)
Clisp has one big wart (lack of threads) but threading isn’t required when just starting out.
If you have a lot of money to spend on a CL, you should consider Allegro or Lispworks.
Good Lisp book:
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
Practical Common Lisp
Also, searching comp.lang.lisp will unearth a wealth of info, even if it’s just pointers to more newbie sites.
Good luck!
March 4, 2008 at 4:51 pm |
I’d get the “Lisp in a box” package that corresponds to the book “Practical Common Lisp”, http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/. The entire book is on line and you can also get a hard copy. It’s probably much better to learn from than Graham’s books, but Graham has exercises at the end of each chapter.
I think I picked up the Allegro version since it runs on my Power based Mac. The downside is I have to get a new license every month or two.