
Learn you a Lisp in 0 minutes - pcr910303
https://wordsandbuttons.online/learn_you_a_lisp_in_0_minutes.html
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eridius
"Can you read something written in the language and figure out what it does"
is wildly different from "can you write something new in the language". This
is testing the first, but I would argue that any even moderately-experienced
software engineer could _read_ the majority of programming languages out there
without too much difficulty.

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masswerk
I think, it serves its purpose pretty well. All those parantheses of a real-
world Lisp program may be quit intimidating, but here you get it pretty
easily.

And I believe as well that a programmer with a bit of experience should get
the examples right, since familiarity and naming of things should help with
the more complex examples. E.g., you know what a factorial is. And even, if
you don't know the quicksort algorithm, you get it that there's some middle
and a left side and a right side and some comparison. So it has to be some
kind of sorting algorithm, and from there you may figure out the details,
which again solidifies your understanding of the basic language concepts.

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asplake
Except that what’s being taught here isn’t much more than just prefix notation
and the simplest possible list examples. Without exposure to lambdas and more
interesting data structures you’ve barely started. It’s fun but it doesn’t
live up to its title.

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sercand
I didn't read the functions to answer questions and I got 7/7\. As a
programmer when I see "qs" and a list I can understand its quicksort (also
"fact" and a number).

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ryeights
Using out-of-place quicksort to advertise functional languages always felt
like cheating to me. The in-place implementations of quicksort (the ones you'd
actually use) are not nearly as pretty

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waterhouse
Eh, even if you end up using an uglier optimized version, having a nice clean
slow version is useful as a test case to verify the other version while you're
developing it.

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frequentnapper
I got 7/7 because of my comp sci background and I expected what these would do
even though I don't know lisp. I think this would've been the case with most
high-level languages for me that I'm unfamiliar with.

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vasili111
I do not have comp sci background. Programming is my hobby (I do not know
Lisp). I got 6/7

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frequentnapper
I'm guessing you missed the last one. The first six were pretty easy to figure
out if you've been exposed to programming. I'm not sure if Lisp makes the last
one any easier than lets say c#.

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busymom0
As someone who dropped out of Haskell in University because I found it too
hard to understand, surprisingly I got 6/7 on this. Quite a beautifully simple
site to learn something new! Looks like it's all implemented using basic HTML?

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wtmt
Just a minute after this quiz, if someone were to provide the answers and
descriptions of what had to be written and asked me to write it in Lisp, I'd
probably get 2/7 or 3/7, covering only the simplest of examples.

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flipcoder
That's probably because the first few steps are very incremental. It skips
ahead faster after that. If you were to make a longer version of this that was
more gradual, I think people would be able to pick up more advanced concepts
correctly, although it would definitely be much longer.

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em-bee
learning your first programming language is hard (for an arbitrary measure of
hard)

when you start learning your second language you think that it's going to be
just as hard. it's only after you are well into learning it that you find out
that the languages are very similar, and from then on out learning new
languages becomes easier.

most programming languages are similar. (there are few exceptions) it just
takes learning a few to realize that.

this post makes an excellent argument to point that out.

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flipcoder
I've always thought learning entirely by example would be possible and might
have speed advantages for quick learners. I'd like to see this method explored
more.

