Re:Starting with Lisp: A collection of beginner pointers
by motxilo on Thursday December 16, 2010 @05:44AM
(#2011659)
I find rather amusing that lispers and schemers differ that much when it comes to lend a hand to people, especially when Scheme is a dialect of Lisp. Do lispers regard the poor schemers in an envious way just because tail-call optimization is part of the Scheme standard? :)
No, seriously. Nowadays, it seems like people sometimes forget what they struggled with when they were learning the ropes of some technology.
Compare this with many other language communities, people regularly ask questions regarding where are the installer's kept which is answered with great politeness by some good netizen. The contrast only occurs that the benchmark of the CL community starts at a higher bar. Recently though, as I wrote in the blog post, even the big-name lisper's seem to guide newbie's to LispBox's URL or suggesting the command line to install SBCL on Ubuntu which certainly is making CL communities a fairly friendly place to be.
The #scheme guys are just amazing. So are the individual mailing lists of the implementation Racket. Somebody on #scheme actually held my hand (metaphorically) to clear my confusion as to which function is the "main" function where execution starts. I used code a little in C/C++/Java and was expecting a function named "main" even though I was testing individual functions from the DrScheme IDE's split window REPL.