

The Newbie Guide to Common Lisp - lispm
http://ghostopera.org/blog/2012/06/24/the-newbie-guide-to-common-lisp/

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brudgers
I was first exposed to Lisp via AutoCad in 1989, but other than creating the
most simple programs it has never made much sense as a language compared to
BASIC and those using semi-colons.

Just last night, I read PG's explanation of Lisp in _Hackers and Painters_
that Lisp's parentheses are there because a Lisp program is its own parse tree
(I hope I got that right) and that this is what gives it its flavor.

That explanation is what I think was missing from the Lisp tutorials I used to
read, and what is missing from the article. Showing a few examples of lisp
programs shows how all those insipid parentheses are used, but doesn't explain
why.

A lisp tutorial can't look like a semicolon language tutorial without ignoring
what's most beneficial in the language. To understand lisp, I think grsping
the computer science concepts matters to a degree that it doesn't in some
other languages.

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mark_l_watson
It is ten years old, but I put together a guide with LOTS of help from the
Lisp community "Loving Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer's Secret Weapon"
<http://markwatson.com/opencontent/lisp_lic.htm>

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pdeuchler
This is more a guide on how to get up and running using SBCL and Emacs, and
less a guide on Common Lisp

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opminion
Any experience using Emacs with "cl" (a package to add Common Lisp
functionality to elisp)?

(Now that it has lexical scoping...)

I would rather avoid installing anything else than Emacs before I write the
first program that _must be efficient_. Is cl good enough for that? Or should
I go straight to SBCL or similar if I don't want to restrict myself to writing
emacs packages?

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gruseom
I've used the CL package in Emacs (with the proviso that if you're using it to
build an Emacs library, as I was, then you're supposed to restrict its use to
compile time, which is weird and takes back most of the value). It doesn't
make Emacs Lisp into anything much like Common Lisp. The two are very
different languages. The CL extensions in Emacs are kind of useful if you
already know CL, but they're also a strap-on and the result is predictably a
monstrosity.

I think you'd be better off picking which of the two languages you're
interested in and learning that.

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opminion
Thanks, it's clear now. I was confused about the purpose of the cl package.
Just checked the manual again and it is not misleading.

I think it was my wishful thinking as I was looking for something more concise
than elisp's set functions.

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xfax
As someone who is currently reading SICP, this is a great complement. Thanks
for putting it together.

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tmhedberg
You realize that the code given in SICP is Scheme, not CL, right?

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mahmud
Emacs/Slime combo is how one writes _any_ kind of Lisp code nowadays. I have
Slime (swank, really) backends for CL, scheme, clojure, dylan, etc.

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prpatel
Not trying to thread dump, but I see more practicality from learning Clojure.
You'll get a wealth of libraries and an active community to help you on your
journey.

That said, if you want to learn CL for fun, that is understandable (heck, I
did it myself after doing elisp years ago in grad school). I recommend 'Land
Of Lisp' as a fun way to learn CL.

~~~
pavelludiq
I find common lisp to be plenty practical, its libraries mostly
satisfactory(restas/cl-redis/cl-closure-template make a good combo for playing
with web development), and its community's frankness and no bullshit attitude
are rather refreshing after spending some time in the land of the cool kids.
Also these lists of success stories contain some impressive shit:

<http://www.franz.com/success/> <http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/>
<http://wiki.alu.org/Industry%20Application>

PS Land of lisp is an awesome book.

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EastCoastLA
This article should direct the "Newbie" to the very comprehensive Wikipedia
article.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp>

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postfuturist
I've found Vim + Slimv + SBCL an adequate development environment as a long
time Vim user.

