Sup Fedi,

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@pfr If you are interested in Lisp I recommend learning it as a long term project. It's worth giving a good look to both Common Lisp and Scheme so that you can decide what you like.

As for where Lispers congregate, if you prefer forum platforms you may have a look at this new community:

meta.lisp community

A new home for all brave lispers.

(community.metalisp.dev)

[binder@masto.hackers.town]

@pfr Depends a lot on what you want and where you want to go. It is very good to have a project when you start learning a language... is there one you would like to start with?

Happy to give you a guide.

[rlonstein@social.stonetools.tech]

@pfr I'd suggest these books:

* How To Design Programs, Scheme, https://htdp.org/
* Practical Common Lisp, Common Lisp, https://gigamonkeys.com/book/

[binder@masto.hackers.town]

@lproven @drwho @pfr @beardie_jamie The first step to learning emacs is to print out the cheat sheet and start highlighting things as you learn them

[mason@partychickens.net]

@pfr Land of Lisp and Realm of Racket are fun introductions.

[pkal@social.sdfeu.org]

@pfr Read the Structure and Interpertation of Computer Programs or Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence.

[drwho@masto.hackers.town]

@binder @lproven @pfr @beardie_jamie This also works for tmux.

[prema@hachyderm.io]

@pkal @pfr i will chip in: David S. Touretzky : Common LISP is nice bigginner book. Reads bit like old BASIC textbook. I love the Barski’s Land of Lisp, but arguably it is not really begginner book.
I wrote my own toy lisp (in c++), but it works and now it has maybe 7 users in my lab

[mapcar@mastodon.sdf.org]

@lproven @pfr @drwho @beardie_jamie Not really, at work we did a one point use lisp for a product and I had a colleague that was doing his work exclusively with vim.

I am myself immersed in emacs so cannot comment in depth but vim has (my understanding is) numerous extensions that makes it useable for lisp work.

[mapcar@mastodon.sdf.org]

@pfr You will need a lisp environment.

Many distributions has SBCL directly available.

If you have chosen one of the suggested texts, they will presumably provide instructions on how to set something up related to the text.

There is also https://lispbox.common-lisp.dev though it is oriented towards Emacs, which may not be ideal for you.

For learning, it is not terribly important which lisp dialect you select. If you are into retrocomputing, you may want to check out https://interlisp.org

[zenie@piaille.fr]

@pfr
Emacs will give you a good foothold.

Search clojure for the brave and true which is a very entertaining tutorial on clojure using emacs.

There are many flavors of lisp.

For scheme look to the SCIP it is the textbook for CS at MIT for many years.

[Guest]

@pfr

A couple examples of excellent talks:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdwr9tweTDE
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI

Next, some street preacher shit with a side does of wrath: "Let Over Lambda" by Doug Hoyte https://letoverlambda.com/ it a truly daunting book about the power and dark magic which is known as Lisp Macros. This will bend your brain.

Finally the obligatory mention of Paul Graham's "On Lisp" https://paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

I have not read that, but it is well received by Important People. Graham was already way too culty by the time I knew about this book. My first encounter with him was the plan for spam, which was good, but had that culty vibe. Then YCombinator occurred, and the rest is the history of the end of the world.

Many other commentators are probably worth your time. I saw someone mentioned Steve Yegge but I wouldn't go near him at all - he has shown to be a dribbling buffoon in recent times. Call that my wrathful contribution to a possible schism.

HTH