Lisp Community - Quality tutorials/resources

Question

As many other people interested in learning Lisp, I feel the resources available are not the best for beginners and eventually prevent many new people from learning it. Do you f

Answer 1

Lisp has been around for a long time, there are many (fragmented) communities. There's really no way to "create" a common community, especially from the outside.

Paul Graham would be a likely (IMNO, N=naive) person to potentially unite a large lisp community, given his popularity among younger programmers, as well as his background in lisp (writing On Lisp). However, he has chosen to create a yet another dialect of lisp, Arc.

Many folks have written about the fragmentation of the Lisp community, or Lisp's inability to "catch on". Some examples: here, here, here, and here. So, while your idea is a good one, it is probably fruitless.

That being said, don't let me stop you from rising up and being such a uniting figure in the Lisp community.

As far as existing tutorials, the Emacs Wiki is a good starting place for learning Emacs Lisp. And for an introduction to Scheme - as well as a good introduction to programming in general, there's the classic Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

I find those two resources to be good starting points for learning Emacs Lisp and Scheme. I haven't played with Arc, but presumably there would be some good tutorials on learning Arc - because it is designed in part to be a good language for creating basic web apps.