
Lisp: No easy download - nickb
http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/node/29
======
daniel-cussen
As someone who tried to go from noob to SICP, I can attest to this.

I was really like looking forward to learning lisp after reading pg's essays,
but when the time came to install the environment, I hit a brick wall.

Pg does mention a noob should get a tech-savvy friend to help him get started.
Unfortunately, all the hackers I knew were in the Bay Area, but I was in South
America.

Installing Lisp on a mac took me two months, working full time (between
macports and other false starts, like trying to install linux). I still can't
get slime on emacs; I have to run clisp in the terminal.

So, yeah, not exactly user friendly, or accessible to beginners.

~~~
gaius
See my link to Lispbox below.

~~~
radu_floricica
Lispbox is great, but when coming from a different environment I found it
extremely useful to customize emacs a little (nothing fancy, F2 for save,
ctrl-C copy) and unfortunately you can't do that in lispbox.

To the GP, it takes a lot of time and effort, but what you learn stays with
you. Can't remember how many times I installed everything afresh, and on how
many machines, but now it's really easy and, though it could be confirmation
bias, rather elegant. I'm pretty sure I could teach somebody up to my level in
3-4 weeks, including lisp itself.

That said, I'm still not done installing - today i tried
<http://dirtyhack.org/vetler/docs/cl-webapp-intro/part-1/> and got a "make-
pset is an undefined function" for no apparent reason. <Sigh> I guess it's
another Elephant reinstall in the next break. But it does get easier :) This
autumn I hope I can move to actual programming.

------
schtog
lispbox(common lisp) and drscheme(scheme ldo) are two good
packages/environments but it isnt obvious how to find them.

the value of a "click to download-click to install-write short piece of code
and see result" -cycle hat can be done immediately is very high.

feedback is obv very important for learning and LISP doesnt provide much of
that in the beginning.

with python you can create games and simple but useful programs right away.

when arc is finished im all for helping to create a good IDE and libraries to
it and document it well and create a very easy path for beginners to gte
started.

then maybe lisp can get popular.

i think it will stay a small language though.

------
pchristensen
It's still not a one-click, but I have written install guides thorough enough
to work on the first try for CLisp and SBCL:

[http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-
clisp-e...](http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-clisp-emacs-
and-slime-on-windows-xp/)

[http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-sbcl-
em...](http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-sbcl-emacs-and-
slime-on-windows-xp/)

It takes about 15 minutes and includes installing Emacs and SLIME, plus a
super basic Emacs tutorial enough to open and save files.

------
gaius
Actually there is, it's just not where you expect it :-)

<http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/>

~~~
aggieben
Then maybe this should be the first of 3-4 links on lisp.org. A newbie is not
likely to find this (I know I didn't know anything about Lispbox when I first
started, although to be fair, I'm not sure it was out at the time).

------
tx
Yeah, he should have added "Part-2: Downloading Libraries". They actually
exist, and can rival comprehensive library of Python, but it takes quite a lot
of energy to discover. I remember asking here on HN "what is CL standard
library? where is it documented?" and people actually pointed to a magic place
that I forgot to bookmark and now I'm lost again. :-)

Ubuntu does a decent job of packaging some popular CL libs in their apt repos.

~~~
pchristensen
CL Hyperspec: <http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/index.html>

Download a copy from LispWorks:
ftp://ftp.lispworks.com/pub/software_tools/reference/HyperSpec-7-0.tar.gz

------
brlewis
Anonymous said it best: <http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/node/29#comment-69>

~~~
aggieben
The comment was

    
    
      there is no canonical Lisp implementation like there is for Python and Ruby  
    

True. But still, try to find a link anywhere on lisp.org (let alone the front
page) to any implementation of lisp. The shortest path I could find to
downloading any kind of implementation was to click "ALU Wiki" ->
Implementations -> wherever. That's at least 4 clicks to actually get Lisp and
the first link takes you away from lisp.org. That's too many clicks, and too
indirect (if you are a newbie looking to download Lisp, why would you click on
a link with the text "ALU Wiki"?).

The very first paragraph on lisp.org should be a terse explanation that there
are many implementations of lisp, Common Lisp is the most widely used, and to
get started, you probably want one of <list the 3 most popular ones here> with
the text linked directly to the download page for that implementation.

There's no reason that someone trying to get started should have to read "The
Rich History of Lisp" or anything else so abstruse, or anything that has so
little to do with programming Lisp (like most of the ALU stuff). Someone
should convince the ALU that lisp.org should be for Lisp and that the first
view links should not be:

    
    
      ALU
    
      History
    
      Board / Minutes
    
      Sponsors
    
      Membership
    
      Contact Us

~~~
radu_floricica
Arguing between 3 or 4 clicks doesn't change anything. There are a lot of
problems with beginners and lisp, but they're far from how to get to the first
implementation. As a newbee myself, googling for lisp environments was damn
easy and instructive: i knew within 20 minutes that I should use linux, and if
i really wanted windows (as I did at first) there was only one choice. When I
finally had access to a decent linux it took me maybe another 20 to confirm
that sbcl is the one I wanted. All that gave me lots of background information
on the side.

Now the first brush with asdf on the other hand was a nightmare. I still don't
understand why I have to become an expert in pgp (definitely not just a
beginner) just to use asdf-install.

I think the main problem for beginners is the effort it takes to install a
reasonable environment. I tried two versions for a web application server: ucw
and weblocks. Weblocks meant installing more then 10 different packages and
source code is pretty much standard documentation - but it's ok because it's
understandable and officially beta anyways. UCW is the standard - after a year
and a half I still couldn't produce an installation running on a port
different then 8080 (I use 8080 for tomcat for all my machines).

All this effort is way disproportionate to the effects. Installing emacs and
slime is may not be a breeze, but once you discover that googling "emacs
configuration" brings up a bonanza it's worth it. (Also that .emacs in windows
is _emacs... that's half a day I'll never have back). But so much effort just
to get a server running... if you want to help beginners write a better ucw
tutorial, don't just rearrange the links on the frontpage of lisp sites.

(btw, I hit ctrl-C before hitting reply, I just knew there was an "expired
link" comming. And so it did.

~~~
aggieben

      Arguing between 3 or 4 clicks doesn't change anything.
    

You're wrong. And besides, the argument isn't between 3 or 4 clicks. It should
be no more than 2, and preferably _one_.

    
    
      There are a lot of problems with beginners and lisp, but
      they're far from how to get to the first implementation.
      As a newbee myself, googling for lisp environments was 
      damn easy and instructive: i knew within 20 minutes that 
      I should use linux, and if i really wanted windows (as I 
      did at first) there was only one choice.
    

You're still wrong. Not every newbie even knows what to google for, and even
if they did, it shouldn't take them _20 minutes_ of web searching to figure
out what they should download. And even that didn't lead you to the right
place - there is more than one option for Windows (cusp, allegro, lispworks,
and clisp for starters - that's not even counting scheme stuff), Linux isn't
the only way, and SBCL isn't the only thing going on Linux. But a newbie
either

a) has no way to figure all that out in a reasonably short amount of time b)
isn't going to try

And beyond that, you're still missing the point: _he shouldn't have to_.

Once you're concerned with learning emacs and slime and customizing your
environment and installing weblocks and getting asdf and asdf-install to work,
you're already committed. Difficulty doesn't matter nearly as much by that
point. Being able to easily download and dick around in the REPL is the number
one hurdle that keeps people from trying Lisp.

The rest of the post I agree with, and I don't argue that there are hurdles
beyond the first one that are bigger and harder to conquer, but that's
irrelevant if newbies aren't willing to jump the first one.

~~~
radu_floricica
Right now I have a feeling most young lispers are at the intermediate stage.
Thanks to lots of recent publicity, by pg and not only, people have gotten to
know lisp exists. But I'm really not sure how many will go all the way. Even
myself, in about a year I'll have to ditch java and if by then I'm not
confident enough in my lisp... i'll probably learn ruby in a month.

As for the number of clicks... yes, as far as website design goes of course
you're right. What I'm saying is 20 minutes of googling gives you more
background. Half a page of text will probably just recommend clisp on windows,
sbcl on linux, allegro if you want to pay and mention all the rest. Googling
gives you a larger picture. Ok, in the end of course one click would be
better, I just don't think it makes much difference.

------
dreish
It was pretty easy for me, on my Fedora box:

    
    
      # yum -y install clisp

------
jrockway
perl.com is not the Perl home page.

------
anonym
<http://www.sbcl.org> -> "Downloads" -> Linux/x86 (or your architecture/OS of
choice).

Hold on a second, I need to lie down for a moment after all that hard work
there.

OK. Yes, there's not one Lisp implementation that is canonical and called
"Lisp" and which lives at lisp.com. Life is pain.

~~~
feijai
I actually recently had to install SBCL on my OS X 10.4 (Tiger) box. Here's
how it went:

1\. Grab from the Downloads folder.

2\. Build.

3\. Bombs during building because SBCL now relies on a link symbol which
doesn't exist in Tiger. Apparently all Mac Lisp users are require to be 10.5
Leopard users.

4\. Swear a bit.

5\. Search the web.

6\. Find lots of people swearing also, no answers.

7\. Try CVS.

8\. Build.

9\. Bombs during build.

10\. More swearing.

11\. Start hunting through earlier versions of SBCL.

12\. About 10 downloads later (and they take a _lot_ of time each to download
and build until it fails), finally find one which doesn't rely on the symbol.

13\. Am now running SBCL.

All told, about eight hours.

~~~
anonym
Why are you building, instead of downloading the binary?

