On: Ask YC: Learning Lisp

[jrockway]

Honestly, ANSI CL isn't quite as nice as PCL, but my opinion is that they're both too brief an entry to Lisp, especially for people new to functional programming and Lisp. "A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" would probably be a better start point for CL, as would those Little Schemer books would be for Scheme.

I disagree. PCL could have been condensed down to a few presentation slides. It takes a long time to not say much.

[gruseom → jrockway]

PCL could have been condensed down to a few presentation slides

Well, that's a little unfair. It couldn't be condensed to a few slides for people who don't know Lisp. Which is its target audience, after all.

I do agree that PCL isn't as concise as ACL. But we'd know that from the limit theorem on Paul Graham's writing anyway :)