Help with Learning Programming and LISP

Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Raghav Gururajan]

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Hello Folks!

I do not have any computing and programming background. I would like to
 learn programming starting with LISP. I found out that there are
dialects of LISP. The ones I am interested in are Common LISP, Emacs
LISP, Scheme and Guile Scheme.

Can some one suggest indroductory yet comphrensive books (self-study)
for computing and programming and LISP? Looking for a swiss-army-knife
kind of book.

Thank you!

Regards,
RG.

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Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[John Soo]

Hi Raghav!

>  I would like to learn programming starting with LISP

Great! Lisp is probably the best language to start with! 

Lisp books also rank among the best introductory materials to programming. I highly recommend these two:

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (often called SICP)

This uses a dialect of scheme, so you can do the exercises without much translation using guile or racket. It touches on many aspects of computer science and I think is closest to the swiss-army knife you deacribed. There are also excellent lectures freely available on YouTube by the authors.

- Land of Lisp

This is an introduction to Common Lisp. I am less familiar with it, but it always comes highly recommended as a fun introduction to programming by writing simple games. If I’m not mistaken, it may be a little more pragmatic than SICP. 

Hope that helps and happy hacking!

- John

Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice]

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Raghav,

I can't *not* mention classics like SICP (Free, comes with 
retro-wave videos, easily found on-line), and The 
{Little,{R,S}easoned} Schemer series (not free, and not for 
everyone).  Both of these focus on Scheme, which as you probably 
know is a very elegant minimal dialect of Lisp.

With that out of the way, and as much as I enjoyed them, I don't 
think either can be described as swiss army knives.

I just last week downloaded ‘The Land of Lisp’[0] for a friend. 
It's definitely more modern and a lot more silly, aims to help you 
‘learn Lisp, one game at a time’, and sounds the hands-on 
introduction you're looking for.

In the more serious camp: I've heard good things about Practical 
Common Lisp.  Unlike Land of Lisp, it's freely available 
on-line[1].

I can't personally vouch for either, but I hope to have been of 
service.

Kind regards,

T G-R

[0]: http://landoflisp.com/ (beware: my IceCat shows an audio icon 
:-)
[1]: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

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Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice]

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Tobias Geerinckx-Rice 写道：
> I don't think [SICP] can be described as swiss army knife.

John Soo 写道：
> I think [SICP] is closest to the swiss-army knife you deacribed.

Heh…  I freely admit to not having a clue what ‘Swiss-army 
knife’ really means in this context.

SICP is great!

Kind regards,

T G-R

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Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Raghav Gururajan]

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> I can't personally vouch for either, but I hope to have been of 
> service.

Thank you Tobias!

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Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Raghav Gururajan]

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> Hope that helps and happy hacking!

Thank you John!

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Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[John Soo]

Hi TGR,


> Heh…  I freely admit to not having a clue what ‘Swiss-army knife’ really means in this context.
> 
> SICP is great!

Haha, I think I meant from a computer science perspective. I suppose that probably does not cover what most people think of as a swiss-army-knife, though. Nonetheless I think neither of us could recommend SICP highly enough.

- John

Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Vladimir Sedach]

Here are some "introductory yet comprehensive" books about programming
with Scheme that will help you get proficient with Guile and other
Scheme implementations:

Felleisen et al's How to Design Programs: https://htdp.org/

Havrey and Wright's Simply Scheme

Springer and Friedman's Scheme and the Art of Programming

Out of these I recommend Havrey and Wright's Simply Scheme the most.
It has the best treatment of input/output and text processing, a
couple of large realistic projects (a spreadsheet and a database),
and a chapter on Common Lisp.

Vladimir

Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Jesse Gibbons]

On Mon, 2019-09-09 at 09:38 -0700, John Soo wrote:
> Hi Raghav!
> 
> >  I would like to learn programming starting with LISP
> 
> Great! Lisp is probably the best language to start with! 
> 
> Lisp books also rank among the best introductory materials to
> programming. I highly recommend these two:
> 
> - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (often called
> SICP)
> 
> This uses a dialect of scheme, so you can do the exercises without
> much translation using guile or racket. It touches on many aspects of
> computer science and I think is closest to the swiss-army knife you
> deacribed. There are also excellent lectures freely available on
> YouTube by the authors.
> 
> - Land of Lisp
> 
> This is an introduction to Common Lisp. I am less familiar with it,
> but it always comes highly recommended as a fun introduction to
> programming by writing simple games. If I’m not mistaken, it may be a
> little more pragmatic than SICP. 
> 
> Hope that helps and happy hacking!
> 
> - John
SICP is packaged in guix. "guix install sicp" will install the HTML and
info versions.
 
Land of Lisp looks good, but I haven't read it. The author helped write
"Realm of Racket" which looks very similar, but I haven't read it
either.

As for emacs lisp, the "emacs lisp intro" (aka "An Introduction to
Programming in Emacs Lisp.") is a good start and "elisp" (aka "GNU
Emacs Lisp reference manual.") is full of reference material. Both can
be downloaded from the emacs site[1] and are included in emacs by
default. (C-h i C-s "emacs lisp" should help you find them.)



[0] https://nostarch.com/realmofracket.htm
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/

Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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I've read Practical Common Lisp.  It's very good to learn Common Lisp if
you already know the basics of programming.

It's rather "practical" and does not go into the deeper concepts
introduced by SICP.  In particular, it does not deal much with
functional programming.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi,

I’d like to second Vladimir’s recommendation of Felleisen's How to
Design Programs (https://htdp.org/).  It is a very well-written book
that doesn’t go too deep without preparing you first.  (I should note
that I didn’t finish it.)

SICP is a classic, and it is very comprehensive, but it is also has a
steeper learning curve than other books.  Some of the exercises are
really hard, and some are a little too “engineery” for casual
programmers.  You will spend a lot of time on each important concept,
but it can be hard to stay motivated for as long as it takes to get to
the next exciting concept.  I prefer the videos by the authors, which
cover the same ground but more quickly, so staying motivated is less of
an issue.  If you want a book that will definitely keep you busy: this
is it.

Unlike others, I did not enjoy The Little Schemer much.  It has a very
unique style of questions and answers, but sometimes it feels very
forced and it ended up confusing me more than it helped.  Some people
swear by The Little Schemer, but personally I would not recommend it to
new learners.

“The Land of Lisp” is quirky and an odd joy to read!  It’s got cartoons
and weird drawings, so if you have a short attention span like me you’ll
appreciate that.  If you use it to prepare yourself for learning Scheme,
though, you’ll be disappointed as the code they present is not at all
idiomatic Scheme.  There’s a lot of mutation and inelegant Common Lisp
forms (well, “inelegant” or “overengineered” from a Schemer’s
perspective, perhaps) that are not how you’d do things in Scheme.

There’s hardly anything about functional programming in the book, and
sometimes I found the examples too long to develop an intuition about
the problem and how to solve it myself from scratch.  (The author also
compares Haskell and purely functional programming to an oppressive
regime in a cartoon, which I think is in poor taste.)  Perhaps games
aren’t the best kinds of problems for learing a new language.

“Realm of Racket” is very similar to “Land of Lisp”, but I had —
inexplicably — less fun and ended up skipping over many of the examples.
It’s not really a problem with the writing — perhaps I just grew tired
of motivating myself with games.  It uses Racket, which I think is a
more beautiful (collection of) language(s) than Common Lisp, and it is
closer to what you would find in Guile.

--
Ricardo

Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Zelphir Kaltstahl]

I would like to add "The Little Schemer" to the list of good books
suggested here. Damn did I get a lot out of that little book. It starts
at the very beginning, but accelerates quickly.

I would say I got more out of SICP than The Little Schemer, but both are
phenomenal books in my opinion. SICP has many many pages and covers many
topics. More than are treated in The Little Schemer, but the content in
The Little Schemer is very enlightening as well, just like many things
in SICP were for me. In The Little Schemer I read multiple chapters
multiple times to get a better understanding and often was rewarded by
understanding it better and even better, when I later typed that code
into my machine and wrote comments for everything. I am far from
finished with SICP, but I had a lot of "Aha!" moments with it too. Both
highly recommended books, but they might take also some time to get
through, if you have a job and not much time to spend on the books.

Haven't read Practical Common Lisp.

Realm of Racket was a little disappointing for me personally, as in my
version there was some code missing and thus some example did not work
(the procedure `decay` is missing in my book). I also did not buy in to
the "Big bang" thingy that much. I would have preferred to write
something on top of a minimalistic 2D engine instead. In general is it a
nice idea though, to get content across by writing small games.

I still have PAIP (Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming)
here and am not sure how to sort it in. So far it has been good content,
but I also have not progressed very far into it yet. I am rewriting the
code in Scheme so far, when I try out the code of it.

Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Viet Le]

Thanks for your recommendation. May I ask if Scheme has support for TDD or
are there any TDD libraries/frameworks in Scheme? A quick online search
didn’t show desired results. I found only TDD for Clojure.

Thanks,
Viet

On Tue, 10 Sep 2019 at 22:24, Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de>
wrote:

> I would like to add "The Little Schemer" to the list of good books
> suggested here. Damn did I get a lot out of that little book. It starts
> at the very beginning, but accelerates quickly.
>
> I would say I got more out of SICP than The Little Schemer, but both are
> phenomenal books in my opinion. SICP has many many pages and covers many
> topics. More than are treated in The Little Schemer, but the content in
> The Little Schemer is very enlightening as well, just like many things
> in SICP were for me. In The Little Schemer I read multiple chapters
> multiple times to get a better understanding and often was rewarded by
> understanding it better and even better, when I later typed that code
> into my machine and wrote comments for everything. I am far from
> finished with SICP, but I had a lot of "Aha!" moments with it too. Both
> highly recommended books, but they might take also some time to get
> through, if you have a job and not much time to spend on the books.
>
> Haven't read Practical Common Lisp.
>
> Realm of Racket was a little disappointing for me personally, as in my
> version there was some code missing and thus some example did not work
> (the procedure `decay` is missing in my book). I also did not buy in to
> the "Big bang" thingy that much. I would have preferred to write
> something on top of a minimalistic 2D engine instead. In general is it a
> nice idea though, to get content across by writing small games.
>
> I still have PAIP (Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming)
> here and am not sure how to sort it in. So far it has been good content,
> but I also have not progressed very far into it yet. I am rewriting the
> code in Scheme so far, when I try out the code of it.
>
>
> --
Kind regards,
Viet

Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Zelphir Kaltstahl]

There is at least one SRFI for a unit test library. Is that sufficient
as "support for TDD"?

https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-64/srfi-64.html


On 9/11/19 10:53 PM, Viet Le wrote:
> Thanks for your recommendation. May I ask if Scheme has support for
> TDD or are there any TDD libraries/frameworks in Scheme? A quick
> online search didn’t show desired results. I found only TDD for Clojure.
>
> Thanks,
> Viet
>
> On Tue, 10 Sep 2019 at 22:24, Zelphir Kaltstahl
> <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de <mailto:zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de>> wrote:
>
>     I would like to add "The Little Schemer" to the list of good books
>     suggested here. Damn did I get a lot out of that little book. It
>     starts
>     at the very beginning, but accelerates quickly.
>
>     I would say I got more out of SICP than The Little Schemer, but
>     both are
>     phenomenal books in my opinion. SICP has many many pages and
>     covers many
>     topics. More than are treated in The Little Schemer, but the
>     content in
>     The Little Schemer is very enlightening as well, just like many things
>     in SICP were for me. In The Little Schemer I read multiple chapters
>     multiple times to get a better understanding and often was rewarded by
>     understanding it better and even better, when I later typed that code
>     into my machine and wrote comments for everything. I am far from
>     finished with SICP, but I had a lot of "Aha!" moments with it too.
>     Both
>     highly recommended books, but they might take also some time to get
>     through, if you have a job and not much time to spend on the books.
>
>     Haven't read Practical Common Lisp.
>
>     Realm of Racket was a little disappointing for me personally, as in my
>     version there was some code missing and thus some example did not work
>     (the procedure `decay` is missing in my book). I also did not buy
>     in to
>     the "Big bang" thingy that much. I would have preferred to write
>     something on top of a minimalistic 2D engine instead. In general
>     is it a
>     nice idea though, to get content across by writing small games.
>
>     I still have PAIP (Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming)
>     here and am not sure how to sort it in. So far it has been good
>     content,
>     but I also have not progressed very far into it yet. I am
>     rewriting the
>     code in Scheme so far, when I try out the code of it.
>
>
> -- 
> Kind regards,
> Viet

Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Viet Le]

Thank you Zelphir, this looks great!

Viet

On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 at 22:24, Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de>
wrote:

> There is at least one SRFI for a unit test library. Is that sufficient as
> "support for TDD"?
>
> https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-64/srfi-64.html
>
>
> On 9/11/19 10:53 PM, Viet Le wrote:
>
> Thanks for your recommendation. May I ask if Scheme has support for TDD or
> are there any TDD libraries/frameworks in Scheme? A quick online search
> didn’t show desired results. I found only TDD for Clojure.
>
> Thanks,
> Viet
>
> On Tue, 10 Sep 2019 at 22:24, Zelphir Kaltstahl <
> zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de> wrote:
>
>> I would like to add "The Little Schemer" to the list of good books
>> suggested here. Damn did I get a lot out of that little book. It starts
>> at the very beginning, but accelerates quickly.
>>
>> I would say I got more out of SICP than The Little Schemer, but both are
>> phenomenal books in my opinion. SICP has many many pages and covers many
>> topics. More than are treated in The Little Schemer, but the content in
>> The Little Schemer is very enlightening as well, just like many things
>> in SICP were for me. In The Little Schemer I read multiple chapters
>> multiple times to get a better understanding and often was rewarded by
>> understanding it better and even better, when I later typed that code
>> into my machine and wrote comments for everything. I am far from
>> finished with SICP, but I had a lot of "Aha!" moments with it too. Both
>> highly recommended books, but they might take also some time to get
>> through, if you have a job and not much time to spend on the books.
>>
>> Haven't read Practical Common Lisp.
>>
>> Realm of Racket was a little disappointing for me personally, as in my
>> version there was some code missing and thus some example did not work
>> (the procedure `decay` is missing in my book). I also did not buy in to
>> the "Big bang" thingy that much. I would have preferred to write
>> something on top of a minimalistic 2D engine instead. In general is it a
>> nice idea though, to get content across by writing small games.
>>
>> I still have PAIP (Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming)
>> here and am not sure how to sort it in. So far it has been good content,
>> but I also have not progressed very far into it yet. I am rewriting the
>> code in Scheme so far, when I try out the code of it.
>>
>>
>> --
> Kind regards,
> Viet
>
> --
Kind regards,
Viet

Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Raghav Gururajan]

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Hello Everyone!

Thank you all for your suggesstions.

After careful review, I have chose following books to read:

PROGRAMMING CONCEPTS:
1) Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
2) How to Design Programs

COMMON LISP:
1) ANSI Common LISP

EMACS LISP:
1) An Introduction to Programming in Emacs LISP

SCHEME:
1) The Scheme Programming Language

:-)

I have a doubt though, do I have to learn dialects of LISP in a
particular order?

Regards,
RG.

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Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Konrad Hinsen]

On 12/09/2019 03:16, Raghav Gururajan wrote:
> I have a doubt though, do I have to learn dialects of LISP in a
> particular order?

No, you can learn each of them on its own, and proceed in any order if 
you want to learn all three of them.

If your main goal is to learn about the core features of the Lisp 
family, I'd start with Scheme, which is the smallest and most coherent 
Lisp dialect. Common Lisp is huge in comparison, but if you try to write 
real-life programs in Scheme, you will discover that there are actually 
good reasons for having a large standardized language. The other main 
difference is that Common Lisp implementations tend to have much better 
development environments and in particular much better debuggers, which 
is also a consequence of the minimalist vs. practical tool approaches 
taken by the two dialects.

In my opinion, there is exactly one reason for learning Emacs Lisp: to 
configure and extend Emacs. Some people also use Emacs Lisp for text 
processing tasks, because Emacs provides an excellent support library 
for that. But as a language, Emacs Lisp is mostly considered outdated 
and inferior to either Scheme or Common Lisp. I would definitely not 
recommend learning Emacs Lisp as a typical modern Lisp.

Konrad.