| A few tips from another aspiring lisper, who's only a little bit ahead down the road: - Read a lot of code. Its essential to learn to read and understand common lisp code with little effort. In many cases, a lot of libraries have incomplete or outdated documentation, so the source code is the best documentation available. - You'll have to learn to piece together a lot of incomplete information, scattered around in blogs, documentation, wikies, and source code. - Prefer portable libraries rather than implementation specific extensions, if possible. - Learn emacs. - I would suggest also learning a bit about the history of lisp, a lot of weird things in lisp make a lot more sense if you consider the historical context in which many design decisions were made. - Don't whine or complain, be a doer. My favorite quote from "The bipolar lisp programmer" is at the end: "Lisp is, like life, what you make of it." You have to take matters into your own hands in order for things to get better. Even though I've only been using common lisp for a few months, i like to think of myself as personally responsible for the state of the Lisp ecosystem, because im not writing libraries or documentation, nobody is going to do this stuff for you. There simply aren't enough of us. - Avoid the "Smug lisp weenie" mentality, its not helping. Sure, lisp is better than java(by some criteria), but feeling smug about this isn't helping at all. It only drives people away. Im currently compiling a larger list of such tips and opinions. I hope to be able to publish it soon, so more experienced lispers can help me with it. |