Comment by harperlee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harperlee | Hacker News Reader

If you mean Common Lisp, I'd say install SBCL and start playing with with the repl. Choose the editor you know best; even notepad is useful to copy and paste expressions to/from the repl. Any editor that's suited for programming will have a way to send expressions to the repl with a keystroke, which is much more comfortable. So basically, just pick VSCode.

With that, you're ready to go. Take just one book and work through it, you don't need the best book, but a book will be better structured and more complete than multiple blog posts from different people. Practical Common Lisp (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/) is good and freely available. I used ANSI Common Lisp (http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html), from Paul Graham (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg), long time ago and it's also good.

If you are open to non-common-lisp lisps, I'd say pick up clojure instead of common lisp, it's more modern and thus you will find more community and up-to-date resources. Clojure for the Brave and True is a book that has been praised, but I did not read it. It has some jokes and humorous examples that might or might not suit you.

I'm doing Clojure for the Brave and True right now and it has been an amazing resource. It even incentivized me to get into Emacs as well, which has been a blast. I'm not a fan of the humor, but it does not get in the way at all.

Am a stalwart fan of the humor. And the cover with its dwarven warrior wielding his lambda hammer is a priceless inspiration to rise to the task and code.

VSCode has a Swank client that has a functioning REPL along with other goodies for interactive programming.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rheller....

SBCL is great, but one should not use an editor, which doesn't have proper paren matching and some indentation support. That is just making your life miserable. So SBCL+Slime+Emacs is a great combination. Or alternatively, get the free version of Lispworks.

Whoa, that's a big jump you made there from paren matching plus indentation to emacs. If he is just learning, emacs might be overkill. I was just simplifying the minimum requirements. But I agree with you about parens. This is not 100% popular but for a newbie I'd add the following recommendation:

Make sure your editor has parinfer available. Not parindent, parinfer. People swear by parindent, but you don't need it on day one. Just try it later on. Parinfer is your friend.

Yes, it is a step, but learning the very basics of emacs isn't that hard either. I just cannot bear the view of someone trying to edit Lisp code with an editor without the basic support. This easily leads to all the horror stories you can read on the internet about Lisp :). Also, with Slime you get a great integrated environment. You can evaluate functions directly from the sources. Unless you plan to go with one of the IDEs, Slime is a great Lisp environment. Once you know Emacs+Slime, you won't need any other environment, so why not start with it?

"If you mean Common Lisp, I'd say install SBCL and start playing with with the repl"

I meant any lisp. Common lisp, clojure, ccl. I am new to this so did not have a choice. But in this thread I get the feeling that common lisp is the most suggested.

If you want a bunch of Lispers to recommend a Lisp, then it's hard not get the most traditional one recommended. If you think the value proposition of Clojure sounds interesting, then just go with Clojure. If you think Racket sounds interesting, just go with Racket. They're all Lisps, but serve different niches.

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