

Download Lisp to my brain. - Mz

If I were a character in the movie The Matrix, I could ask an operator to download a program to my brain so I could fly a helicopter or something.  I would like to learn Lisp and, well, download it to my brain as rapidly as possible so I can start working with it to write a roguelike.  I am looking for good online resources, preferably including a sand-box or similar.  I learned to code my websites by having a template (gifted to me by a friend) and playing with it and I still learn new things when I want/need to do something new on my sites.  I know a little (X)HTML and CSS already and had intro to VisualBasic about 7 years (which I don't particularly remember, of course).<p>Yes, I know I can google this.  But since I know nothing, I can't judge the quality of the sources.  So I am hoping folks here will indulge me.<p>Thanks.<p>PS:  Am I supposed to do an intro?  I just joined today and this is my first post.
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mahmud
Assuming this isn't a Joke:

Lisp IDE for Windows (the easiest and most basic; use it just for your first
30 days, after that move to SLIME.)

<http://www.daansystems.com/lispide/>

Implementations (both work with LispIDE above)

<http://clisp.cons.org/> (byte compiled, fast)

<http://sbcl.org> (natively compiled, multithreaded, industrial strenth)

Books

<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/> (easiest intro)

More here <http://lisp.org/alu/res-lisp-education>

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Mz
No, this isn't a joke. Thank you for replying.

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mahmud
You might wanna revise that "download to brain" requirement. Programming is a
skill learned and polished over years; none of us are Johny Mnemonic ;-)

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Mz
Just hoping to convey a concept. I already write code by hand, just not
programming languages. :-)

Thank you!

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cesare
Lisp nowadays comes in two main flavours (dialects, technically): scheme and
Common Lisp.

I prefer the former and my favorite implementation at the moment is plt-scheme
(<http://www.plt-scheme.org/>).

From the website above you can download the distribution of the language for
your platform. It also has a very nice IDE which has been designed primarily
for learning.

Here's a book to get you started (it is fully available online):
<http://www.htdp.org/>

Happy hacking!

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Mz
Thanks! Any reasons why you prefer scheme to Common?

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cesare
For me it's mostly an aesthetic thing. It's difficult to explain.

I just find simple things more elegant than and Scheme is terser and all the
implementations (that I know of) are lighter than CL. It' s also very easy to
embed in C code.

I'm by no means an expert, though.

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palsecam
For an online sandbox, you can use _the Lord of the REPLs_ from Google:
<http://lotrepls.appspot.com/>.

You can evaluate expressions (= program) in 2 Lisp dialects, Scheme and
Clojure, directly in your browser! (You can also use other non-Lisp languages,
notably Ruby).

~~~
Mz
Thank you everyone. This thread is the best internet discussion experience I
have had in a long time. :-)

