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Comment by lprd | Hacker News Reader

One of these days I'm gonna sit down and properly learn Lisp. My career as a programmer is still relatively young ( < 5 years), and learning lisp won't provide any value in my day-to-day work. But understand the concepts and paradigms of Lisp certainly has to have some value.

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In some strange ways I wish I never had. And I'm truly not being overly hyperbolic when I say I struggle to enjoy programming in other languages.

I can do it but I can just never quite make the other languages fit how I want to think about the problems.

I think one major barrier is that nearly every language I have to use is lumbered with truly horrible data handling with the pervasive OO model that is so bad. I've used CLOS too much to never look at OO the same again.

And then if I'd rather just think of things as name/value collections, Clojure is just so easy.

I think you're just stuck with the wrong languages. I too like to structure nearly everything as plain data (name/value collections, lists, etc) these days, but I do it in TypeScript or Python or Rust. It doesn't require a lisp.

Lisps make it much, much easier though. My dayjob is python, but my heart yearns for clojure

Different strokes I guess. I played with Clojure a bit and it didn't really hook me; TypeScript is the language that I feel lets me beam my thoughts directly into code.

Fwiw, clojure is an acquired taste. It took me months to rewire my brain and get comfortable with it. Enjoy your time with TS and remember clojure if it ever doesn’t satisfy you anymore

Except for the macros you can use JS the same as you use Clojure.

I'd also recommend the Nand2Tetris course / book if you haven't done it already.

people have accumulated a lot of lisp impl on Make A Lisp repo

https://github.com/kanaka/mal

Although it's Scheme, I recommend "The Little Schemer". It's quite short, but fun, and by the end of it you should have the idea and be able to pick up other texts with ease.

Been leering at lisp in the corner for 23 years. Been doing c/c++/delphi/go/objC/swift all this time. I finally have had it with OO and static typing.

Javascript was my first intro to the liberation dynamic types and functional programming can bring when I built a project in Vue. I kinda loved it.

I started writing code in emacs lisp to help me write and navigate xml and it's been wonderful. now im deciding on whether to use Common Lisp or guile to build some projects. I'm sold.

Nitpick, but there's no need to lump OO and static typing together. IMO, both static typing and non-OO data structures are at their best when used together.

Indeed. go is an example. I much prefer interfaces and structural inheritance.

There's also SICP and Lisp in Small Pieces, maybe also Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, that contain very interesting stuff with Lisp and in general.

Paip is a good and useful one to learn

https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

Oh man, that's the one I meant, not AIMA+Lisp. But AIMA is great in general.

have you read L.i.S.P cover to cover ? I still have to finish it

also do you know other books of the same kind ?

No, I read chapters from time to time, I'd love to have time to read all of it.

Maybe, I'll think about it.

It depends, if you switch to Emacs you could get proficient with Emacs Lisp. If you are used to think with objects, thinking with data + functions will change the way you solve problems. Finally you could use a modern Lisp like Clojure for a small project at work or your next job.

Besides that, the history of Lisps is fascinating, specially Lisp machines.

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