Re:Ask HN: Which Lisp should I learn?
by brudgers on Monday November 02, 2020 @03:22PM
(#24972757)
What are you going to be reading alongside it?
Common Lisp goes well with Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence: case studies in Common Lisp. And Norvig's book is a good way to learn what makes Common Lisp a big deal from an engineering perspective while still being entirely accessible to a below average programmer with some experience (at least that's my experience).
Racket goes well with the many Racket tutorials online and Felleisen's How to Design Programs. HtDP is a good beginner resource for software engineering and the many online Racket tutorials are suitable for many other levels of experience.
Racket will work with Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs with a bit of configuration. But MIT Scheme is simpler to use with SICP right out of the box.
There are reasons Clojure is popular and I think it's a great language, but learning Clojure is more about learning Clojure than about learning what people usually mean by "Lisp."
Emacs Lisp (elisp) is great if what you are going to be reading is it's documentation and it maps up reasonably well with a lot of Common Lisp. It's a very good language that becomes a great language if you like Lisp and EMACS because it hooks into "Emacs as an operating system" natively. It's a practical approximation of the mythical LispMachines at your finger tips.
Common Lisp goes well with Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence: case studies in Common Lisp. And Norvig's book is a good way to learn what makes Common Lisp a big deal from an engineering perspective while still being entirely accessible to a below average programmer with some experience (at least that's my experience).
Racket goes well with the many Racket tutorials online and Felleisen's How to Design Programs. HtDP is a good beginner resource for software engineering and the many online Racket tutorials are suitable for many other levels of experience.
Racket will work with Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs with a bit of configuration. But MIT Scheme is simpler to use with SICP right out of the box.
There are reasons Clojure is popular and I think it's a great language, but learning Clojure is more about learning Clojure than about learning what people usually mean by "Lisp."
Emacs Lisp (elisp) is great if what you are going to be reading is it's documentation and it maps up reasonably well with a lot of Common Lisp. It's a very good language that becomes a great language if you like Lisp and EMACS because it hooks into "Emacs as an operating system" natively. It's a practical approximation of the mythical LispMachines at your finger tips.