lisp

Note: I am not asking which to learn, which is better, or anything like that. I picked up the free version of SICP because I felt it would be nice to read (I've heard good stuff about it, and I'm interested in that sort of side of programming). I know Scheme is a dialect of Lisp and I wondered: what is the actual difference is between Scheme and, say, Common Lisp? There seems to be a lot about 'CL has a larger stdlib...Scheme is not good for real-world programming..' but no actual thing saying 'this is because CL is this/has this'. This is a bit of a tricky question, since the differences are

Also, even if I can use Common Lisp, should I? Is Scheme better? You have several answers here, but none is really comprehensive (and I'm not talking about having enough details or being long enough). First of all, the bottom line: you should not use Common Lisp if you want to have a good experience with SICP. If you don't know much Common Lisp, then just take it as that. (Obviously you can disregard this advice as anything else, some people only learn the hard way.) If you already know Common Lisp, then you might pull it off, but at considerable effort, and at a considerable damage to your

I'm currently primarily a D programmer and am looking to add another language to my toolbox, preferably one that supports the metaprogramming hacks that just can't be done in a statically compiled language like D. I've read up on Lisp a little and I would love to find a language that allows some of the cool stuff that Lisp does, but without the strange syntax, etc. of Lisp. I don't want to start a language flame war, and I'm sure both Ruby and Python have their tradeoffs, so I'll list what's important to me personally. Please tell me whether Ruby, Python, or some other language would be best

For those of you experienced in both Haskell and some flavor of Lisp, I'm curious how "pleasant" (to use a horrid term) it is to write code in Haskell vs. Lisp. Some background: I'm learning Haskell now, having earlier worked with Scheme and CL (and a little foray into Clojure). Traditionally, you could consider me a fan of dynamic languages for the succinctness and rapidity they provide. I quickly fell in love with Lisp macros, as it gave me yet another way to avoid verbosity and boilerplate. I'm finding Haskell incredibly interesting, as it's introducing me to ways of coding I didn't know

I like to study languages outside my comfort zone, but I've had a hard time finding a place to start for functional languages. I heard a lot of good things about Structure and Interpretations of Computer Programs , but when I tried to read through it a couple of years ago it just seemed to whiz over my head. I do way better with books than web sites, but when I visit the local book store the books on LISP look kind of scary. So what's a good starting point? My goal is to be able to use a functional programming language to solve simple problems in 6 months or so, and the ability to move to more

I usually write web apps in PHP, Ruby or Perl. I am starting the study of Scheme and I want to try some web project with this language. But I can't find what is the best environment for this. I am looking for the following features: A simple way of get the request parameters (something like: get-get #key, get-post #key, get-cookie #key). Mysql access. HTML Form generators, processing, validators, etc. Helpers for filter user input data (something like htmlentities, escape variables for put in queries, etc). FLOSS. And GNU/Linux friendly. So, thanks in advance to all replies. Racket has

Someone is trying to sell Lisp to me, as a super powerful language that can do everything ever, and then some. Is there a practical code example of Lisp's power? (Preferably alongside equivalent logic coded in a regular language.) Mikael Jansson I like macros. Here's code to stuff away attributes for people from LDAP. I just happened to have that code lying around and fiigured it'd be useful for others. Some people are confused over a supposed runtime penalty of macros, so I've added an attempt at clarifying things at the end. In The Beginning, There Was Duplication (defun ldap-users () (let (

Thanks a lot for all the beautiful answers! Cannot mark just one as correct Note: Already a wiki I am new to functional programming and while I can read simple functions in Functional programming, for e.g. computing the factorial of a number, I am finding it hard to read big functions. Part of the reason is I think because of my inability to figure out the smaller blocks of code within a function definition and also partly because it is becoming difficult for me to match ( ) in code. It would be great if someone could walk me through reading some code and give me some tips on how to quickly

I really feel that I should learn Lisp and there are plenty of good resources out there to help me do it. I'm not put off by the complicated syntax, but where in "traditional commercial programming" would I find places it would make sense to use it instead of a procedural language. Is there a commercial killer-app out there that's been written in Lisp ? Justin Bennett One of the main uses for Lisp is in Artificial Intelligence. A friend of mine at college took a graduate AI course and for his main project he wrote a " Lights Out " solver in Lisp. Multiple versions of his program utilized

Software Engineering as it is taught today is entirely focused on object-oriented programming and the 'natural' object-oriented view of the world. There is a detailed methodology that describes how to transform a domain model into a class model with several steps and a lot of (UML) artifacts like use-case-diagrams or class-diagrams. Many programmers have internalized this approach and have a good idea about how to design an object-oriented application from scratch. The new hype is functional programming, which is taught in many books and tutorials. But what about functional software