Sup Fedi,
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@pfr as for becoming a member: Personally I found Practical Common Lisp to be a good start of my lisp journey. It absolutely drew me in with the sheer efficiency of the code (by which I mean how much is accomplished with comparatively very little code). You can read it for free: at https://gigamonkeys.com/book/
@abraemer Amazing! thank you
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Sup Fedi,
I want to get indoctrinated into the world of #LISP
I am not a programmer, nor software developer. I am familiar with basic shell scripting and a little bit of C but that's about it.
Where does the internet church of Lisp congregate and how do I become a member?
Please boost
Thanks@pfr Racket, which is derived from Scheme, has a whole introduction to programming textbook available here: https://htdp.org/2026-2-25//Book/index.html
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@pfr Racket, which is derived from Scheme, has a whole introduction to programming textbook available here: https://htdp.org/2026-2-25//Book/index.html
@pfr MIT has open online course materials based on the textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs which also uses Scheme: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/
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Sup Fedi,
I want to get indoctrinated into the world of #LISP
I am not a programmer, nor software developer. I am familiar with basic shell scripting and a little bit of C but that's about it.
Where does the internet church of Lisp congregate and how do I become a member?
Please boost
Thanks@pfr you can follow lisp related hashtags on fedi (lisp, commonLisp, scheme, guile, emacs), or there are irc or matrix rooms if they're your thing.
there's https://gigamonkeys.com/book/, very well written and fine if you're not a programmer, also https://files.spritely.institute/papers/scheme-primer.html. (for both you'd want to get a lisp or scheme env set up so you can follow along.)
also the little schemer book is cool too, including pedagogically.
(i also learned lisp as a non-programmer, i think it's great)
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S stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe shared this topic
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Sup Fedi,
I want to get indoctrinated into the world of #LISP
I am not a programmer, nor software developer. I am familiar with basic shell scripting and a little bit of C but that's about it.
Where does the internet church of Lisp congregate and how do I become a member?
Please boost
Thanks@pfr why LISP?
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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Sup Fedi,
I want to get indoctrinated into the world of #LISP
I am not a programmer, nor software developer. I am familiar with basic shell scripting and a little bit of C but that's about it.
Where does the internet church of Lisp congregate and how do I become a member?
Please boost
ThanksWhere? Oh gosh, I think there was a mailing list that was popular some years back? Maybe one of the ones listed here: https://common-lisp.net/independent-lists
Long ago (like, MC68K era) I seem to recall the low level Macintosh stuff being implemented in Forth (which is sort of like a dialect of a Lisp, maybe more specifically Scheme? My memories in such realms are soooo old, don't quote me on that; since I have probably forgotten more than I once used to know having toiled in such realms.).
@cwebber@social.coop seems more up to date on more recent goings on with Lisp variants than I and has made mention of Guile (https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/) as something more contemporary that was news to me! Chances are, there's a lot of other more recent stuff I am pretty clueless about that others' are exploring and extending.
At least personally, I found the Lisp Machines (e.g. LMI [Lisp Machines International], Symbolics [the first dot com domain!] and to a lesser extent Texas Instruments) that evolved out of MIT's CADR research fascinating! It is possible, though with dubious copyright legality, to run OpenGenera (the Symbolics OS, more or less) on AMD64 hardware running Linux. Those machines, despite their name, ran other languages too, including C compilers and even supposedly had hardware bounds checking! So they weren't exploitable via common buffer overflow stack smashing techniques, supposedly? They were also open, down to their microcode. Contrasted to a lot of contemporary systems with their (U)EFI and BIOS being binary blobs completely obscured from users? A very different world. Apparently a lot of early X Windows bugs were identified and fixed thanks to Lisp Machines. The UNIX Hater's Handbook was largely written by individuals who were supposedly privileged enough to use Lisp Machines users. Such workstations were not inexpensive for their era, I seem to recall some Lisp machines costing in the range of $60,000+ USD, in the 1980s. Also, probably my favorite GPU name ever was for Lisp Machines the: FrameThrower. From Evans & Sutherland (the Sutherland being Ivan Sutherland, of Sketchpad [one of the first GUI systems and probably the first object-oriented programming system] notoriety, and he was also Alan Kay's doctoral advisor IIRC). At toorcon 8, dnm and I were planning to talk more extensively about Lisp Machines and some of the good ideas from a security perspective that seemed to have been lost and or forgotten by others in the ensuing decades; but we kind of got derailed by Captain Crunch getting added to the panel in the 11th hour who hadn't done any prep with us and just kind of talked about whatever he felt like instead. Ah well. If you want a pop culture reference, a Lisp Machine also makes a cameo in the 1985 movie Real Genius where the reclusive Lazlo Hollyfeld hacker archetypal character can be seen with such a thing displaying some pretty groovy graphics!
I dunno about membership! It's probably a little too ad hoc and maybe closer to a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) paradigm? Though I may be entirely incorrect about that. ^_^
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Sup Fedi,
I want to get indoctrinated into the world of #LISP
I am not a programmer, nor software developer. I am familiar with basic shell scripting and a little bit of C but that's about it.
Where does the internet church of Lisp congregate and how do I become a member?
Please boost
Thanks -
@pfr why LISP?
@iredave I guess I can't really give a good reason, other than I'm interested in it and that seems like a good place to start.
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Sup Fedi,
I want to get indoctrinated into the world of #LISP
I am not a programmer, nor software developer. I am familiar with basic shell scripting and a little bit of C but that's about it.
Where does the internet church of Lisp congregate and how do I become a member?
Please boost
Thanks@pfr This new book just dropped about the history of Lisp. As a decades old C programmer it is mind expanding!
Cees de Groot (@cdegroot@mstdn.ca)
Attached: 1 image Well, today is the day. I'm finally "sorta happy enough to pull the trigger" on publishing the book I've been working on for a very long time. It's a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for "tech-adjacent" and "tech-interested" people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy in 1958 and today still going strong (to the extent that many people see it as the most powerful programming language in existence). And this is a time for shameless self promotion, even if you don't plan on buying the book, please repost :-). Self-publishing is self-marketing, so there we go. If you do buy and read it, please let me know how you liked it! The book landing page, https://berksoft.ca/gol, has links to all outlets where you can buy the book,
Mastodon Canada (mstdn.ca)
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@drizzy @pfr this ^^^. It's the most practical way of leveraging list in day to day work, and once you're indoctrinated, you see it everywhere.
And of course https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/index.html is a bible for every LISP enthusiast.
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@pfr I am not a LISP coder, so the only thing I can say is, maybe emacs' LISP would be a good start?
The best summary I know:
«
• Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.• Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: 'the car that's always in front of you.'
• Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle.
»For a pleasant intro, I hear Scheme is fairly clean.
Clojure is trendy but arguably sort of not really a real Lisp any more: maybe better if you have a specific job to get done. But I hear the community is quite welcoming.
The cognoscenti all recommend SICP as the Bible to get started.
I tried. I found it utterly unreadable. But then, I am a very poor programmer.
I am not one of the cognoscenti. I'm just an onlooker. I am nowhere near smart enough.
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The best summary I know:
«
• Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.• Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: 'the car that's always in front of you.'
• Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle.
»For a pleasant intro, I hear Scheme is fairly clean.
Clojure is trendy but arguably sort of not really a real Lisp any more: maybe better if you have a specific job to get done. But I hear the community is quite welcoming.
The cognoscenti all recommend SICP as the Bible to get started.
I tried. I found it utterly unreadable. But then, I am a very poor programmer.
I am not one of the cognoscenti. I'm just an onlooker. I am nowhere near smart enough.
The illuminated ones also recommend learning Emacs first. I have tried. Repeatedly. I find it totally impenetrable, too. The only things that helped at all in any way were the excellent macOS version, Aquamacs, now sadly effectively moribund:
The Emacs for the Mac
An Editor for Text, HTML, LaTeX, C++, Java, Python, R, Perl, Ruby, PHP, and more… Aquamacs is a modern editor based on GNU Emacs. Read more. Download Aquamacs Emacs 3.6 for Mac OS 10.11 (El Capitan) or later
Aquamacs Emacs (aquamacs.org)
And for non-Mac-users, the mad guru of this stuff, Xah Lee, who created ErgoEmacs:
It makes GNU Emacs kind of usable, but, for the Enlightened Ones, you're getting to know an impure, polluted vision.
But it's comprehensible. May work for you. -
Where? Oh gosh, I think there was a mailing list that was popular some years back? Maybe one of the ones listed here: https://common-lisp.net/independent-lists
Long ago (like, MC68K era) I seem to recall the low level Macintosh stuff being implemented in Forth (which is sort of like a dialect of a Lisp, maybe more specifically Scheme? My memories in such realms are soooo old, don't quote me on that; since I have probably forgotten more than I once used to know having toiled in such realms.).
@cwebber@social.coop seems more up to date on more recent goings on with Lisp variants than I and has made mention of Guile (https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/) as something more contemporary that was news to me! Chances are, there's a lot of other more recent stuff I am pretty clueless about that others' are exploring and extending.
At least personally, I found the Lisp Machines (e.g. LMI [Lisp Machines International], Symbolics [the first dot com domain!] and to a lesser extent Texas Instruments) that evolved out of MIT's CADR research fascinating! It is possible, though with dubious copyright legality, to run OpenGenera (the Symbolics OS, more or less) on AMD64 hardware running Linux. Those machines, despite their name, ran other languages too, including C compilers and even supposedly had hardware bounds checking! So they weren't exploitable via common buffer overflow stack smashing techniques, supposedly? They were also open, down to their microcode. Contrasted to a lot of contemporary systems with their (U)EFI and BIOS being binary blobs completely obscured from users? A very different world. Apparently a lot of early X Windows bugs were identified and fixed thanks to Lisp Machines. The UNIX Hater's Handbook was largely written by individuals who were supposedly privileged enough to use Lisp Machines users. Such workstations were not inexpensive for their era, I seem to recall some Lisp machines costing in the range of $60,000+ USD, in the 1980s. Also, probably my favorite GPU name ever was for Lisp Machines the: FrameThrower. From Evans & Sutherland (the Sutherland being Ivan Sutherland, of Sketchpad [one of the first GUI systems and probably the first object-oriented programming system] notoriety, and he was also Alan Kay's doctoral advisor IIRC). At toorcon 8, dnm and I were planning to talk more extensively about Lisp Machines and some of the good ideas from a security perspective that seemed to have been lost and or forgotten by others in the ensuing decades; but we kind of got derailed by Captain Crunch getting added to the panel in the 11th hour who hadn't done any prep with us and just kind of talked about whatever he felt like instead. Ah well. If you want a pop culture reference, a Lisp Machine also makes a cameo in the 1985 movie Real Genius where the reclusive Lazlo Hollyfeld hacker archetypal character can be seen with such a thing displaying some pretty groovy graphics!
I dunno about membership! It's probably a little too ad hoc and maybe closer to a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) paradigm? Though I may be entirely incorrect about that. ^_^@teajaygrey @cwebber @beardie_jamie
Violating your wishes:
> Long ago (like, MC68K era) I seem to recall the low level Macintosh stuff being implemented in Forth
Not quite. The early PowerPC Macs ran OpenFirmware, and it uses Forth for its configuration language. It's not _written_ in it, no.
68K Macs do not use it, and the OS was implemented partly in Object Pascal, not Forth.
> (which is sort of like a dialect of a Lisp,
No, not really. The main things Forth and Lisp share is _not_ using algebraic notation, and typically being partly implemented in themselves... and that's about all, TTBOMK.
> maybe more specifically Scheme?
No. Only in the sense that Scheme is a minimalist sort of Lisp and Forth is also minimalist.
> My memories in such realms are soooo old, don't quote me on that
... sorry...
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@drizzy @pfr this ^^^. It's the most practical way of leveraging list in day to day work, and once you're indoctrinated, you see it everywhere.
And of course https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/index.html is a bible for every LISP enthusiast.
@inecas @drizzy @pfr @beardie_jamie
> And of course https://
mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/index.html is a bible for every LISP enthusiast.I replied before seeing this, but I feel it validates my point rather well.
I bailed after the introductory page, which was gobbledegook to me. Seriously, I read fast, I read a lot, and the only book that I bounced off this hard was my first Patrick O'Brian novel, with its over-page-length single sentences.
The only readable comprehensible Lisp book I've seen I could follow is one I never managed to buy on dead tree.
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Sup Fedi,
I want to get indoctrinated into the world of #LISP
I am not a programmer, nor software developer. I am familiar with basic shell scripting and a little bit of C but that's about it.
Where does the internet church of Lisp congregate and how do I become a member?
Please boost
Thanks> Where does the internet church of Lisp congregate
If anywhere, Hacker News.
It's owned by Paul Graham, one of the most famous Lisp advocates.
HN is implemented in his dialect of Lisp, called Arc. (On top of Steel Bank Common Lisp.)
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The illuminated ones also recommend learning Emacs first. I have tried. Repeatedly. I find it totally impenetrable, too. The only things that helped at all in any way were the excellent macOS version, Aquamacs, now sadly effectively moribund:
The Emacs for the Mac
An Editor for Text, HTML, LaTeX, C++, Java, Python, R, Perl, Ruby, PHP, and more… Aquamacs is a modern editor based on GNU Emacs. Read more. Download Aquamacs Emacs 3.6 for Mac OS 10.11 (El Capitan) or later
Aquamacs Emacs (aquamacs.org)
And for non-Mac-users, the mad guru of this stuff, Xah Lee, who created ErgoEmacs:
It makes GNU Emacs kind of usable, but, for the Enlightened Ones, you're getting to know an impure, polluted vision.
But it's comprehensible. May work for you.@lproven @drwho @beardie_jamie I suppose I should look at Emacs. But I'll always be a vim user
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@inecas @drizzy @pfr @beardie_jamie
> And of course https://
mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/index.html is a bible for every LISP enthusiast.I replied before seeing this, but I feel it validates my point rather well.
I bailed after the introductory page, which was gobbledegook to me. Seriously, I read fast, I read a lot, and the only book that I bounced off this hard was my first Patrick O'Brian novel, with its over-page-length single sentences.
The only readable comprehensible Lisp book I've seen I could follow is one I never managed to buy on dead tree.
@lproven @drizzy @pfr @beardie_jamie Yes, it's not a light reading, and much more about the concepts on how (not only) lisp is implemented, rather than just use it. But the question was about the church of Lisp, and needs to be mentioned as one of the holy books. And once one gets over the initial bar, it's actually quite eye-opening.
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Sup Fedi,
I want to get indoctrinated into the world of #LISP
I am not a programmer, nor software developer. I am familiar with basic shell scripting and a little bit of C but that's about it.
Where does the internet church of Lisp congregate and how do I become a member?
Please boost
Thanks@pfr I think Land of Lisp is still a good introduction https://nostarch.com/lisp.htm
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@lproven @drwho @beardie_jamie I suppose I should look at Emacs. But I'll always be a vim user
You are pretty much going to have to convert.
(I'm neutral: I can't stand either of them, myself. I am still sad nobody got the joke in this headline:
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/17/tilde_text_editor/ )
There is an Emacs Vi mode called EVIL or VILE or something. I think it's a joke, but this tells you all you need to know about how Emacs folks tend to think about it.
For reference, this will tell you a _lot_ about Emacs and indeed Lisp:
https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
It's why I tried to learn it. IMHO you _NEED_ to read this.
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@lproven @drizzy @pfr @beardie_jamie Yes, it's not a light reading, and much more about the concepts on how (not only) lisp is implemented, rather than just use it. But the question was about the church of Lisp, and needs to be mentioned as one of the holy books. And once one gets over the initial bar, it's actually quite eye-opening.
@inecas @drizzy @pfr @beardie_jamie
I have a vision of myself as a toddler, not tall enough to quite reach that bar you mention, so I can't _quite_ see over it.
