My road to Lisp

About 20 years ago, I was already a heavy emacs user, especially gnus was my favorite newsreader. But I had no deeper understanding of emacs-config files and all this stuff with that many parens. So I started with lisp...

I actually learned Common Lisp (the coolest Lisp-dialect, for daily programming, and everything) at first from "COMMON LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation"[1] by Dave Touretzky. By the way, Dave seems to be a rather cool guy. Amongs other stuff, read about his fight against Scientology[2].

My second book on Common Lisp was Peter Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp"[3]. My advice, never read this book! Because afterwards you will really hate most programming languages, especially all the C++/Java/C# stuff. You will see,

_how macros ease your live_: 100s lines of code in java, shrink to 15 lines in lisp. Build real domain-specific-languages (DSLs), with no barriers on syntax, as you like. And whatever new programming concept you hear about, if it is not already part of Common Lisp, just implement it via macros.

_CLOS - the Common Lisp Object System_: how OOP should be. not more to say. Metaobject protocol, extend OOP as you like.

_Conditions_: what others call exceptions, but much more.

And if you really want the hot stuff, use Common Lisp for you everyday work, read "Common Lisp Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach"[4] by Edi Weitz. Edi Weitz also provided a lot of libraries in the Common Lisp eco-system. Http-client (drakma), Http-server (hunchentoot), regular expressions (cl-ppcre), and so many others.[5]

Footnotes

[1] COMMON LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation

[2] Dave Touretzky

[3] Practical Common Lisp

[4] Common Lisp Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

[5] Ediware

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