Am I being a big baby or is Common-Lisp a pain in the ****?

[dante]

Why so many of these?!  ((((()))))

[Spopepro]

Yes and no...

It's true that lisp has a few quirks (few might be putting it mildly (yeah a lot of quirks (do nested parenthetical statements count as a quirk (is anyone still here)))) but if you think about it algebraically (but not postfix algebraically (also known as rpn (because then you wouldn't have any parenthesis))) it begins to make more sense as a language. The thing was designed and written by mathematicians. Think like one (and not a modern comp sci person (not that there's anything wrong with modern comp sci (but I am biased towards those with a discrete math and algebra background in cs (the products are just a little more elegant)))) and it will start to come together.

[romevi]

I have a slight lisp. I don't really hear it that often, but when I hear it from someone else it's definitely noticeable. I would say it's definitely a pain in the ****, though, because when I hear myself talk, whether on a mic or through a recording, I can't stand the lisp.

[dante]

Yes I think I'll persevere.  However I'm going to start with Racket first and examine CL/Clojure later on.

[tp4tissue]

I have a slight lisp. I don't really hear it that often, but when I hear it from someone else it's definitely noticeable. I would say it's definitely a pain in the ****, though, because when I hear myself talk, whether on a mic or through a recording, I can't stand the lisp.

females with lisp makes them sound super cute... is what tp4 haz noticed...

[rowdy]

I have a slight lisp. I don't really hear it that often, but when I hear it from someone else it's definitely noticeable. I would say it's definitely a pain in the ****, though, because when I hear myself talk, whether on a mic or through a recording, I can't stand the lisp.

females with lisp makes them sound super cute... is what tp4 haz noticed...

Except news readers - kinda annoying when they lisp their way through a news story, especially one with lots of ssss

[jbondeson]

You're being a big baby

Racket's a good first start as it has less anachronisms than CL. Lisp's are definitely not your bog standard procedural language. You have to approach both program design and the act of coding from a different angle.

It's good to learn different programming paradigms though so stick with it.

[Sterenke]

I have a slight lisp. I don't really hear it that often, but when I hear it from someone else it's definitely noticeable. I would say it's definitely a pain in the ****, though, because when I hear myself talk, whether on a mic or through a recording, I can't stand the lisp.

females with lisp makes them sound super cute... is what tp4 haz noticed...

Except news readers - kinda annoying when they lisp their way through a news story, especially one with lots of ssss

And condescending people. They are already annoying, making their lisp unbearable since listening to them is already annoying as hell.

[menuhin]

When one complains LISP (aka "Lost In Stupid Parentheses") has too many parentheses, there is a high chance they are not using an editor or IDE that support the highlighting, pairing, and indentation etc of these parentheses. Many editors have parentheses highlighting and pairing, such as Notepad++, while Emacs is the most classic expandable LISP package with shortcuts and macros of its own tradition and itself is written in Emacs LISP, a dialect of LISP.

Common-lisp is a good dialect to learn. "ANSI Common Lisp" by Paul Graham is a must-read classic for the language, and a classic for programming language in general. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41801.ANSI_Common_Lisp

Scheme is another famous dialect of LISP, though more for education use. "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (2nd edition)" by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman is a classic text of modern computer science and programming https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/. You can also find videos of this long-time course of the MIT professor online e.g.

 

More

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/

A dialect of LISP (plus a specific implementation using JVM) in recent years is Clojure designed by Rich Hickey with the philosophy of "...a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system." though its flavor is a bit more different while still kind of similar to other LISP dialects.

[dante]

When one complains LISP (aka "Lost In Stupid Parentheses") has too many parentheses,

I've never seen that abbreviation for Lisp before.  )

there is a high chance they are not using an editor or IDE that support the highlighting, pairing, and indentation etc of these parentheses. Many editors have parentheses highlighting and pairing, such as Notepad++, while Emacs is the most classic expandable LISP package with shortcuts and macros of its own tradition and itself is written in Emacs LISP, a dialect of LISP.

In general I'm referring to reading code out of a text book.  Some of the statements can have 10+ levels of parens which gets a little unwieldy.  Perhaps the code was written poorly?  Do you know of books/articles that focus on best practices for writing easy to read Lisp?

Scheme is another famous dialect of LISP, though more for education use.

I thought I would start with Scheme (Racket) since it's smaller (I'm more of a less is more kind of guy.)

I'll check out your selection; here is another one that got my attention.

Realm of Racket: Learn to Program, One Game at a Time!

[menuhin]

Reading code on paper is always more difficult than reading code on screen - perhaps use a set of multi-color highlighters? 
I'm not sure if experienced LISP users can read LISP well on paper, my guess is that they'll also "Lost In Stupid Parentheses" if they have to read from paper.

Paul Graham's book is definitely a good start and a good read (surprisingly a programming book can be a good read in case of his) for the style of Lisp.
He's also a good thinker and active person in the CA startup scene in recent years.

Scheme is also a clever alternative approach with the MIT textbook, but it definitely has more syntactic sugar than Common-lisp so you need to be aware of those when you jump over to another dialect.

Those who start in LISP think quite differently from those who start in C/C++ or FORTRAN, e.g. solving problems by recursion in common in LISP.

[dante]

[katushkin]

When one complains LISP (aka "Lost In Stupid Parentheses")

Holy ****, thank you for that, I had no idea what people were going on about and I was going a bit mad.

My problem is people who use other forms of punctuation too much like three dots at the end of a sentence... They aren't used to trail off or to bridge a sentence like they are meant to... They just put them at the end of a sentence like they have ****ing auto correct changing their full stop for three of the ****ers... (periods for those of you from hamburgerstan(America)).....................................

****ing punctuation man...

[Sterenke]

Tapatalk, man.. good platform to read on, less so to type on..

[Sterenke]

When one complains LISP (aka "Lost In Stupid Parentheses")

Holy ****, thank you for that, I had no idea what people were going on about and I was going a bit mad.

My problem is people who use other forms of punctuation too much like three dots at the end of a sentence... They aren't used to trail off or to bridge a sentence like they are meant to... They just put them at the end of a sentence like they have ****ing auto correct changing their full stop for three of the ****ers... (periods for those of you from hamburgerstan(America)).....................................

****ing punctuation man...

Actually, the people using punctuation less than the traditional American is the uncommon Britanian, in her natural environment, scripting java since 1995?

[katushkin]

 

[Sterenke]

Explanation:
In a scientific paper (generally) the British have poor (worse) punctuation, whereas the American papers are well punctuated.
I simply made the joke about Java as I recall recently seeing a robotic arm coded with Java and assembly by a British university (Oxford I believe), when I'd have utilized python for the same task.

Apologies:
I'm sorry for the heavy implicit reference spectrum of the bare interest to humor ratio in the post.. <- (I hope these dots of sincerity is acceptable even by your standards!)

Conclusion:
I'm not used to this forum, please give me time!

[katushkin]

I just was way off in the reference I think hahaha, no need to apologise.

That's interesting about the difference in coding language, although I have never coded a single thing in my life, it's interesting to know there is a preferential difference, as they must have weighed up the pros and cons of different languages (I assume).

[happylacquer]

The only language I had as much trouble learning was Haskell which i find far less useful

[Sterenke]

I just was way off in the reference I think hahaha, no need to apologise.

That's interesting about the difference in coding language, although I have never coded a single thing in my life, it's interesting to know there is a preferential difference, as they must have weighed up the pros and cons of different languages (I assume).

Assembly is simple, Java is safe, Python is advanced (harder to learn, with more specific functions) and precise.

If you're interested in learning code, consider Assembly to be like a one night stand, Java like a dull but stable boyfriend/girlfriend relationship, and Python alike a really messy marriage with your hot cousin (sometimes you're uncertain which one of them, and it turns out they aren't your cousins by blood. But then you wake up and need to fix >5000rows of code because you fell asleep on your Leopold fc660c which properties in terms of use as a pillow you found highly satisfying!).

[Spopepro]

The only language I had as much trouble learning was Haskell which i find far less useful

Which kind of speaks to the challenges of switching paradigm or family or whatever you are supposed to call it. Most people these days are pretty ok with object oriented (ish) languages. Pull out something procedural and algorithmically structured like OP's lisp and there's headaches. Pull out a functional language like Haskell and it's a totally new world. Lots of programmers like to say "I know all the languages and none of them", implying that they just need to look up syntax and protected names and it all works roughly the same. That's true for many languages, but not lisp and not Haskell.

I advised an IB student who's senior independent study thing was on Haskell. It wasn't easy for me either, but fortunately the CEO of cloudera happened to be a parent of a kid on my mountain bike team... so I was able to call in some reinforcements.

[iri]

Clojure has a little less parentheses