

Learning Lisp the hard way - gnosis
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/63d76b19003620d2

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pygy_
I was a bit surprised by the nice and polite tone of the discussion.

Has CLL been evolving towards civility, or is this an exception?

Edit: it becomes rougher at the end, in part because someone trollishly cross
posted a response to a Java group... but still...

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aerique
Neither. CLL has never been as bad a place as some people like to portray it.

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gnosis
Some of the personalities who appear in that thread are mentioned in this list
of "Mad people of comp.lang.lisp":

<http://www.tfeb.org/lisp/mad-people.html>

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zachallaun
This title is going to be misleading to a lot of people familiar with _Learn
Python the Hard Way_ , and other variations using the same methodology.

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KC8ZKF
The article predates _Learn Python the Hard Way_.

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zachallaun
And by quite a while, in fact!

Disappointing, nonetheless. Ah, well... Back to _Land of Lisp_!

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kleiba
I find it remarkable that the one troll that came into the thread trying to
start a flame bait got debunked quickly, but in a rather friendly tone. That
speaks for the community.

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acconrad
I would love to be in a position when I had to learn Lisp for my job. I
struggle to learn it because I never find a good use case for it at work or in
fun projects.

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Natsu
I had to learn AutoLisp for my job. It wasn't really all that fun because I
didn't have to do anything particularly fancy, just a bunch of 8th grade
geometry problems over and over and over and....

Mostly, it made me very familiar with why one might want to find the
intersection points of two circles.

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ScottBurson
Some of the things he misses have existed in some environments, but haven't
become part of the standard toolset that most Lisps provide. For example, the
Lisp Machine had a List Callers command that would show you, and then let you
visit, every function that called a given function. I worked at a place where
we reimplemented that functionality for ourselves, by poking around in the
internals of Allegro, but AFAIK no Common Lisp comes with this feature. It's
too bad, I think, though admittedly grepping the source tree is usually an
acceptable substitute.

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sedachv
[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/lang/lisp/code/tools/xref/0....](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/lang/lisp/code/tools/xref/0.html)

SLIME has been using that since 2004, ILISP has had who-calls since I don't
know when, likewise Lispworks and MCL. Allegro has it too, since at least 1999
according to usenet (it's the :who-calls top-level command).

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emef
Link to the actual package is unavailable on that page btw.

~~~
sedachv
[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-
repository/ai/lang/l...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-
repository/ai/lang/lisp/code/tools/xref/0.html)

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PaulHoule
Well, it is true that CL and most Lisp have a standard library that's about as
well-organized as PHP.

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Luyt
This article is from 2009. Clojure was not as well known as it is today,
otherwise the author would certainly have mentioned it, because he came from
Java. There is one commenter who mentions it, but it didn't pick up.

