If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling faces (and don't even think about mentioning PG in #lisp)

Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by Alex3917 on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @07:52PM (#29351)

You should pick up a copy of The Little Schemer. It's entirely Socratic, assumes no background knowledge, and is probably one of the best books ever written on any subject. And it just happens to be on Scheme, so all the better.

And while Scheme varies in syntax, the concepts are the same.

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Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by herdrick on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @11:57PM (#29413)

Great call, Alex. That's one of my favorite books ever. I blogged this here: http://herdrick.blogspot.com/2006/03/what-all-books-ought-to-be.html

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Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by Alex3917 on Wednesday June 20, 2007 @12:04AM (#29417)

Good post. The only other Socratic book I own is "What is Calculus about" by W.W. Sawyer. It's more loosely Socratic though. There are paragraphs of text interspersed with questions that either ask you to look for a pattern, or else follow a statement to its logical conclusion.

Not as good as The Little Schemer, but it's still cool that you can learn traditional (non-lambda) calc knowing only addition and subtraction.

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Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by palish on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @07:54PM (#29352)

Cool. Does Scheme work on Windows?

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Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by Tron on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @07:55PM (#29353)

Yep. Check out DrScheme: http://www.plt-scheme.org/software/drscheme/

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Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by palish on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @07:56PM (#29354)

Wow; what an amazing breath of fresh air.

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Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by Alex3917 on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @08:07PM (#29358)

Yes. Also, SICP uses Scheme for its examples, so that's the other reason you want to understand Scheme code.

(If you look up SICP on Amazon you'll see PG's review on page one)

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Re:If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling ... by euccastro on Wednesday June 20, 2007 @06:53AM (#29485)

Peter Norvig's review was on the front page too. I found that one even more helpful.

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