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Learning Lisp the hard way (groups.google.com)
70 points by gnosis on Jan 19, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 20 comments


Some of the personalities who appear in that thread are mentioned in this list of "Mad people of comp.lang.lisp":

http://www.tfeb.org/lisp/mad-people.html


I was a bit surprised by the nice and polite tone of the discussion.

Has CLL been evolving towards civility, or is this an exception?

Edit: it becomes rougher at the end, in part because someone trollishly cross posted a response to a Java group... but still...


Neither. CLL has never been as bad a place as some people like to portray it.


This title is going to be misleading to a lot of people familiar with Learn Python the Hard Way, and other variations using the same methodology.


The article predates Learn Python the Hard Way.


And by quite a while, in fact!

Disappointing, nonetheless. Ah, well... Back to Land of Lisp!


I find it remarkable that the one troll that came into the thread trying to start a flame bait got debunked quickly, but in a rather friendly tone. That speaks for the community.


I would love to be in a position when I had to learn Lisp for my job. I struggle to learn it because I never find a good use case for it at work or in fun projects.


I had to learn AutoLisp for my job. It wasn't really all that fun because I didn't have to do anything particularly fancy, just a bunch of 8th grade geometry problems over and over and over and....

Mostly, it made me very familiar with why one might want to find the intersection points of two circles.


There should be a Google AI Challenge coming up in a couple of weeks.


Some of the things he misses have existed in some environments, but haven't become part of the standard toolset that most Lisps provide. For example, the Lisp Machine had a List Callers command that would show you, and then let you visit, every function that called a given function. I worked at a place where we reimplemented that functionality for ourselves, by poking around in the internals of Allegro, but AFAIK no Common Lisp comes with this feature. It's too bad, I think, though admittedly grepping the source tree is usually an acceptable substitute.


http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/lang/lisp/code/tools/xref/0....

SLIME has been using that since 2004, ILISP has had who-calls since I don't know when, likewise Lispworks and MCL. Allegro has it too, since at least 1999 according to usenet (it's the :who-calls top-level command).


I stand corrected. Thanks.


Link to the actual package is unavailable on that page btw.




Pretty sure this feature is in SLIME. It's also in LispWorks.



Well, it is true that CL and most Lisp have a standard library that's about as well-organized as PHP.


This article is from 2009. Clojure was not as well known as it is today, otherwise the author would certainly have mentioned it, because he came from Java. There is one commenter who mentions it, but it didn't pick up.




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