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A comment on Ask news.YC: For the lisp experts - tell me how you learned the language..

Re:Ask news.YC: For the lisp experts - tell me how you lear... by herdrick on Sunday September 23, 2007 @06:45PM (#58632)
The book, "The Little Schemer" is the absolute best and fastest way to break your mind of its old habits and get into lisp programming. Try to write each piece of code before looking at the answer. (Use PLT Scheme.) Afterwards, your freshly broken mind will be ready for all the other concepts that are also important to lisps.

"On Lisp" is great whether you go with Common Lisp or Scheme. I actually tried to learn Common Lisp from scratch with that book, and I slowly slogged my way through five chapters. I got a lot out of it but it would have been better had I learned what car, cdr, mapcar, etc. meant first. Maybe you could try that.

Any time you can get away with writing something in Scheme (or CL, whatever) do it. Just code with it all the time.

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Re:Ask news.YC: For the lisp experts - tell me how you lear... by euccastro on Sunday September 23, 2007 @08:19PM (#58652)
I'm no expert, but I thought I'd add that The Little Scheme is a most enjoyable way to get into Lisp.

I don't think it's that important that you use DrScheme (I suppose that's what you mean with PLT Scheme). If you do, make sure the 'language' is set to standard Scheme, not some 'safe' subset. In The Little Schemer, you go from absolute zero all the way to using continuation passing style, motivating and deriving the Y Combinator, and writing a metacircular evaluator.

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Re:Ask news.YC: For the lisp experts - tell me how you lear... by Goladus on Sunday September 23, 2007 @08:53PM (#58665)
Honestly, you don't even really need to have an immediate need to use an implementation to at least start using s-expressions. I put lisp in my C comments and debugging output. //(summary myfunction "the function does this")

It's still readable, and if I ever want to parse out the comments and do anything with it, it'll be easier.

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