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by kaiwetzel 5214 days ago
My road to lisp has not been without bumps but after initially being inspired by pg's essays and reading the highly motivating Practical Common Lisp[1], quicklisp has greatly lowered the barrier to write real programs for me, installing packages is really easy now, if they are in quicklisp!

Cool interview with Zach, he's also extremely active in the #lisp IRC channel, can't thank him enough.

Regarding Clozure CL pointed out by Mark Watson: there was an "end user" app (though tiny) announced written with CCL available though the mac app store: Picture Window [2] Learning Common Lisp and Cocoa at the same time is very exciting, I hope to see more apps like that in the future (working on one myself).

[1] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

[2] http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/picture-window/id507262984?mt...
1 comments
kinleyd 5213 days ago
Like Zach and you, pg's essays (plus Steve Yegge's rants), influenced me to learn Lisp.

Great interview. I'm on Arc, but will add SBCL because of Zach. :) Also, I remember Steve Yegge writing about how he barked up the wrong tree with Scheme (for purity) when he realized that Common Lisp may be crufty but was what got things done: http://langnostic.blogspot.com/2010/09/yegge-strikes-back-fr...

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Inaimathi 5212 days ago
Just to clarify; I am not in fact Steve Yegge (though I've been told I have a similar writing style), just a young lisper who read his essays.
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kinleyd 5212 days ago
Yes, you do have a similar writing style. From my list of Steve Yegge bookmarks, I was actually thinking of this one, http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab..., where he says this:

"Problem 1: Which Lisp? Sorry, folks, but you can't trivialize this one. Let's say I'm a new would-be Lisper, just finished walking down that long damn Road, and now that I'm here, I'm ready to start using it. Which "it" should I use? The answer is "it depends", and that's pretty unfortunate, because right there you've just lost users. With Python or Ruby or Java, you've only got one language to choose from. Or at least you can be comfortable that there's a single canonical version, and the rest (e.g. Jython) are highly experimental territory.

Pick Scheme, and you have to pick a Scheme. Pick Common Lisp, and you have to pick a Common Lisp. Heck, there are even two or three flavors of Emacs-Lisp out there.

Most newcomers eventually (and independently) decide the same thing: Scheme is a better language, but Common Lisp is the right choice for production work. CL has more libraries, and the implementations are somewhat more compatible than Scheme implementations, particularly with respect to macros. "

Since the full rant is tough on Lisp (and I like Lisp), and since you'd quoted most of the above, I was quick to pull the trigger on which to quote. Thanks for pointing it out.

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