Common Lisp

So I've just downloaded the book Practical Common Lisp from Apress. Over the past few months I have been thinking of learning a new programming language. My first choice was C++, then I decided on Java because I took an introductory course to it last semester. Java and C++ share a lot of syntax commonalities with PHP and Javascript/Actionscript so learning them just didn't feel interesting. My other idea was to learn Python, for no real reason beside the fact that it seemed cool. For some reason I never got around to that...

A while ago I read a few essays about Lisp by Paul Graham. They got me curious but it wasn't until a recent article that cam up on Digg that really sparked my interest. The article was about how Lisp is the "Ducati of Programming Languages". It made it seem interesting, so I checked out the rest of the person's blog and this really sparked my interest. I read over most of it and decided that at some point I should learn lisp.

The last piece of the puzzle came because of javascript. I *love* fooling around with javascript. One thing I especially like is the lambda-style function calls that you can do in it. After reading this post on Isaac Schlueter's blog I knew I needed to find some way to learn it.

So, here's to me and my hopeful success with this new language... But first, I need to figure out how to get it to work on my Mac!

Comments

Check out this interactive tutorial - I learnt Lisp much more quickly using this:

http://apsymac33.uni-trier.de:8080/art/login-e.html

I don't do any Lisp these days however it does change your mindset in terms of working with Javascript.

    by wioota on Feb 4, 2007 @ 10:13pm

Thanks!

[...] As an update to my previous Common Lisp post, I’ve got Lispbox up and running with Emacs, Allegro CL Express, and SLIME and am slowly working my way through Practical Common Lisp. Sofar I really like where it’s going. [...]

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