How to go about learning Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp?

Question

The last few months I\'ve been using Emacs extensively as my main development environment and I\'ve now come to a point at which I\'d like to learn it\'s own Emacs Lisp to w

Answer 1

I assume you searched SO before posting and saw the questions "What's the best way to learn LISP?" and possibly "Tips for Learning Elisp". Those are two good starting points for how to learn either one.

As far as which one to learn first, it all depends on what you want to do. If you have an idea for a project that interests you, then use the appropriate lisp to solve that. For example, if you want to add/change some functionality in your development environment, use emacs lisp. Otherwise (if it's not editor related), use common lisp.

For me, it's all about finding a project that interests you, and using that to guide which language to use.

They're each close enough that becoming familiar with one will make using the other straight forward. Emacs lisp has a lot of domain specific features (buffers, regions, text properties, files, sub-processes, etc.), and common lisp has a wide varieties of libraries to use.