At 02:31 PM 12/20/2009, Sean Devlin wrote: >Hi everyone, >After hacking Clojure for a while, I've come to the conclusion that >studying a second Lisp would help. So, what do the people here >think? What is a good Lisp to study?
While my preference here prior to learning about Clojure has been Scheme for a *long* time, there's serious value to learning Common Lisp. There's a LOT of history in it, and plenty of warts that will make you appreciate Clojure all the more ^_^. >Are there particular dialects & distributions that are interesting? See what Dan Weinreb has had to say here (http://common-lisp.net/~dlw/LispSurvey.html, he looked hard a few years ago to help decide which CL ITA should use for its 2nd system, an airline reservation etc. system). SBCL is supposed to be pretty good and produces good code at the usual expense of compiler time (and it compiles everything first); ITA is happy using it for their computationally intense first project, QPX, which gives you optimal airline trip routing (half a 32 bit address space runs SBCL, half is data populated by a C++ system). ITA ended up using Clozure CL for their 2nd project. You might find ABCL of interest since it runs on top of the JVM, but I don't gather that it's very mature yet and it probably has a smaller community than SBCL. >The things that are important to me are: > >A community at least 1/10th as awesome as this one. Seriously. The Gambit-C Scheme community is perhaps 1/10 as awesome as Clojure's ^_^. >Libs in Lisp - I want to see if there are ideas worth stealing. Common Lisp has a zillion, although lots aren't exactly finished and/or polished. And then there are famous ... artifacts that might be worth studying for a variety of reasons, like Maxima. >Available documentation - I have to be able to read about it, and >teach myself online. There's lots for Common Lisp, several good books, the very readable and usable language spec in available in a hypertext format, etc. If you're interested in OO, CLOS is thought by many to be the best OO system ever, e.g. see the book _The Art of the Metaobject Protocol_. Being able to change your object protocol (how objects work) on the fly is a very powerful concept.... - Harold -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
