[brudgers]

The thing to realize about Common Lisp is that it's not built to accommodate new users in the manner that Scheme was. Common Lisp is entirely intended to be a language for working professional programmers. Implicit in its specification is the idea that any feature that a programmer does not like will be changed, Renaming functions is largely a trivial exercise.

[johnwalker]

Although this project renames functions, that isn't all that it does. Accomodating new users is very necessary for adoption of any language, library or project, especially by having reasonable defaults. All working professional programmers were once beginners. Of course, it's another argument that this project succeeds at any of these.

[brudgers]

I wasn't criticizing the project, just responding to comments.

And I appear to have said "new users" when I really meant "beginners".

Experienced programmers as new users will stick if the language is appropriately expressive. Beginners will stick for different reasons and the only people who really seem to have a handle on beginner programmers from a professional standpoint is the PLT group of Racketeers. Pretty much everything else I see about beginning programmers is based on anecdote and personal opinion not the quality of data Felleissen has collected.

In all seriousness, I hope you're not suggesting Common Lisp, never mind a non-standard version of it, as a beginning programming language in the typical case when much more suitable Lisps are available and under active development.

[lispm]

Where is this fear of Common Lisp from?

Just give them a fun book like Land of Lisp.

[brudgers]

As a beginning language Scheme and especially Racket are better designed languages. There's nothing of significance in Common Lisp that's better for a beginner and much in Scheme and Racket that is.

If I was going to move away from Scheme and Racket for vocational reasons but stay within the Lisp family I'd give strong consideration to eLisp since it touches on toolmaking. Clojure would be a second choice because it touches on imperative programming and library use.

[lispm]

I learned Scheme first. I still find that experience great.

But I moved then to Common Lisp and think that learning Common Lisp from the beginning is much better. Common Lisp is much better suited to write software than Scheme or even Racket. A good Common Lisp implementation has much better tools.

At the University we had a site license of Allegro CL from Franz, Inc.. Every student had access to it via the SUN cluster. That was a revelation to me. These tools were so much better to use and for learning.

[brudgers]

Common Lisp is better than Scheme or Racket in the same sorts of ways that Clojure is better. It's a full on professional tool. But it doesn't have Felleisen's Student Languages or Htdp/universe out of the box to facilitate teaching like Racket.

I've never explored Franz/Allegro because CCL and SBCL etc. carry less baggage because of their FOSS pedigree...it's a bias more against demo/evaluation versions than closed source.