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by MielPopssss 1318 days ago
Hello guys, it's my first time posting here !

Actually, I'm passionate about Lisp dialects, I always been fascinated by languages, when I was a kid, I used to try to learn new languages (Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, ...).

When I was 15, I found out I had a leukemia, a severe form of blood cancer, I had so much free time that I decided to learn programming languages. It was really like a revival, the idea that you can express every ideas into code was mind blowing and a cure for me. I really have a special relationship with programming languages.

Now that I finished my studies at 42 school in Paris and that I have more free times, I can concentrate on what I dreamed to do.

One day, I read the Unicorn Project by Gene Kim and discovered Clojure, which is a dialect of Lisp. I read a lot on the subject, the history of this dialect, the idioms, the functional thinking behind it.

It was mind blowing, the idea that you can express pretty much everything with a little set of atoms ... wow !

So when I find threads on Lisp on HackerNews, I'm always reading it!

Also, I dream about make my own toy programming language, probably a Lisp dialect that will compile to Python bytecode, something like Hy, just to practice.

I take all the advice in my adventure with Lisp !

I'm also passionate about computer science history, last year, I had saved enough money to go to Silicon Valley. For me, it was like a pilgrimage, I visited some historical places, Stanford, the HP house, Palo Alto, Fairchild Semiconductor last place, and of course the Computer History Museum, It was the first time I passed around 6 hours reading every panels.

I'm really thankful to the author of this thread as it was helpful for me to found a place where I can finally express those ideas I had in my mind.

3 comments

> make my own toy programming language, probably a Lisp dialect

I've learned a lot from the "Make a Lisp" project. If you haven't seen it, I'm sure you will enjoy studying it. https://github.com/kanaka/mal

Thanks for the link and the feedback on MAL.

I plan to do it, I also saw interesting projects like implementing a compiler in Lisp, on `build-your-own-x` repo : https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x

Nice, that's a great resource! Thanks for sharing.
I highly recommend writing your own Lisp from scratch. It is a fun project! I have done it more than once and in different languages.
Have you produced anything interest that you could share using lisp/closure/common lisp?
For now, nothing really interesting, it's only guided projects I did with the book Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel and coding challenges on HackerRank and Codingame or projects in Clojure but always guided.

Its a little bit weird because I'm used to do a lot of projects in other languages, but I struggle at beginning new projects in Lisp, its really different from what I'm used to think.

But you're right, I really need to do projects in Lisp, its been a long time since I want to do my own blog and I really think I'll do it in CL or Clojure/Clojurescript.

If you have project ideas, I'll take it. :)