Comment by reikonomusha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reikonomusha | Hacker News Reader

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For Common Lisp, there are several free books available:

- Practical Common Lisp (aimed at people who know how to program in a more mainstream language already) [1]

- Paradigms in Artificial Intelligence Programming (my personal favorite) [2]

- Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation (aimed at absolute beginners of programming) [3]

I highly recommend the r/lisp Reddit community. Reddit as a platform has its issues, but the Common Lisp community there is very responsive and very helpful.

Lastly, you might be interested in checking out Kandria [4], a game written entirely in Common Lisp, to be released imminently on Steam.

[1] https://gigamonkeys.com/book/

[2] https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

[3] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/

[4] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1261430/Kandria/

> you might be interested in checking out Kandria

Along those lines there is a classic side scroller with mouse aiming called Abuse[1] that was written in Lisp. The source code is in the public domain now[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_(video_game)

[2] https://github.com/darealshinji/abuse-game

Is there a reason why some well-known Lisp hackers are Japanese? I noticed the devs of Kandria (radiance, etc.) as well as Fukamachi (woo, clack, mito, etc.), and am wondering what led to that kind of geographical distribution.

  >  Is there a reason why some well-known Lisp hackers are Japanese?

Perhaps, they trained in the 5th gen computing environment begun in 1982 by Japan's MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry).

  "It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like
   performance and to provide a platform for future developments in 
   artificial intelligence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...

Because it is a large country (Population = 124M) and it had already in the past a Lisp community.

Many years ago at an event I met people from a commercial Lisp vendor in California. They had also business cards in Japanese, because a bunch of customers came from there.

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