

The Nature of Lisp (2006) - b-man
http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

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DrJokepu
Commenting on the last paragraph: I honestly believe that one of the biggest
obstacles for newcomers to Lisp is Emacs.

Don't get me wrong, I love Emacs and it is truly the superior environment to
do work in Lisp. However it has a bit of a steep learning curve just like Lisp
itself and fighting two battles (one with Lisp and one with Emacs) is no easy
task for someone coming from a Java / C# and Eclipse / Visual Studio
background. I know because I've been there. That's why I decided to start work
on an open source Visual Studio add-in to support for Common Lisp in Visual
Studio itself. I think being able to do the first steps in a familiar
environment would be a great help for newcomers. I wonder what you guys think
of the idea?

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mahmud
You want LispIDE

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

Hardly a substitute for Emacs/Slime, but for beginners, you can get a lot
done. I use it when I am not plugged into in A/C outlet; it saves battery ;-)

~~~
DrJokepu
Yes I know LispIDE, however it is really nothing more than notepad.exe with
syntax highlighting and some basic REPL integration. I think of the VS F#
editor with REPL ("interactive mode" as it is called there) as an example of
what I'm trying to achieve.

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pchristensen
An oldie but goodie. This helped explain a lot of the often-praised features
of Lisp and functional programming that had never made sense before.

~~~
eru
Yes. However keep in mind that Lisp has left the forefront of functional
programming mostly to ML derived languages.

Common Lisp isn't even very functional. Not much more than e.g. Python. Scheme
is a bit more functional oriented.

~~~
samatman
Clojure, OTOH, is beautifully functional. Also, it is supported by NetBeans
and Eclipse, so no SLIME needed.

~~~
eru
Yes, I forgot about Clojure.

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eru
> After all, I was almost blinded by the infamous Lisp parentheses!

Lisp's parenthesis seem to share their deterrence factor with Python's
significant indentation. Most people who have used one of them for a while
don't even notice them any longer. At least not as a problem.

Interestingly, Haskell seems to be strange enough, that nobody fears its
significant indentation.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Interesting. I _instantly_ liked Python's significant whitespace. It just made
sense: I was already indenting for readability, so why not make it meaningful
as well and do away with curly braces and semicolons?

~~~
eru
It was the same for me. Plays nice with "Say it once and only once.".

