Hacker News Reader

Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

If you want stable, try Common Lisp.

I regret not getting addicted to Lisp early. At Berkeley for EECS, the normal CS61A curriculum was based on scheme, but instead we had a guest lecturer from Google who did it on Python. Sure, I got an A+ and I know Python’s internals well, but damn what a miss for me. I much prefer the functional train.

What’s the best way to get started with Common Lisp now for a very very experienced programmer?

I can't claim to be very very experienced, but I learned a lot from this piece. In particular it convinced me to try Common Lisp precisely because it is stable and boring. Common Lisp has allowed me to focus on solving my problems rather than keeping up with language or ecosystem changes. It's nice to be able to read decades-old books and have them still be good, in contrast to the much newer books I have for other languages where those books are already ready for the trash heap.

But I'm the sort of person who shrugs when someone says "this software is not updated anymore, it must be out of date." I say: maybe that's good, cat(1) hasn't been updated much, isn't that good?

https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/

Absolutely. Many CL libraries when you see them on Github have last been updated 10 or 15 years ago. In most cases it just means they are done and done need further updates.

And CL is just an absolute joy to develop with. Definitely my "stranded on an island" language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com