Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by doomrobo 4003 days ago
Slightly off-topic, but does anybody know of a kind of "LISP Challange" set? I recently started the Matasano challenges[0] and I found them really well-suited to my style of learning (learning by doing and expanding by reading relevant material, enabled by my own internal motivation). Is there anything like that that has a relatively small set of condensed yet rich challenges that demonstrate key elements from LISPy functional programming? I read some of SICP but reading long form really puts a damper on my motivation/excitement. Also there were a lot of exercises (with a lot of overlap in concepts) so I didn't know what to do and what not to do, since I wasn't about to do every single one. Any pointers would be much appreciated!

[0] http://cryptopals.com

2 comments

From the top of my head..:

The Praetorian Bootcamp challenges are similar to the Matasano ones: https://www.praetorian.com/challenges/

Lisp Koans: https://github.com/google/lisp-koans

Project Euler: https://projecteuler.net/

Exercism: http://exercism.io/

99 Lisp Problems: http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~meidanis/courses/mc336/2006s2/func...

I've been using python-koans to teach Python, but the thought of looking for lisp-koans from Github didn't even cross my mind now as I personally started learning CL. Thanks for these excellent links!
the Lisp Koans, Exercism, and 99 Lisp problems look especially good for FP concepts (and the first two are more modern than I had expected). Thanks!
Hi, I don't know if it fits what you want. But there is something like that for clojure[0] . I liked the language a lot. I didn't have the chance to use it in production yet. Another option is hacker rank with challenges [1] [0]https://www.4clojure.com/ [1]https://www.hackerrank.com/
http://exercism.io supports Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, and Emacs Lisp, plus a ton of others, and runs through a neat little CLI app locally, so you can use your own editor (I've been doing Rust challenges in Emacs, frex.)

http://www.codewars.com/ also supports Clojure, and Haskell, which is not a Lisp but is FP.

Hacker Rank pretty much supports everything, but the reason for this is that it handles all the tests through stdio instead of a test suite, resulting in a lot of irritating boilerplate code.

Well, that stdio thing is actually what I love about Hacker Rank :) I don't think the boilerplate code is a problem, if you use a reasonable language. Racket is a pleasure to use over there, Clojure slightly less so but wouldn't call it irritating...

But yeah, I've seen some Java solutions on HR...

I just wind up getting irritated having to rewrite the same code all the time. Some popular languages will generally come with a pre-filled template with the I/O already covered, but quite a lot of the FP stuff didn't.