On this page... (hide)
Anyone who gripes about the profligate way Lisp uses parentheses is completely missing the point. Parentheses are just the simplest possible way of depicting tree-structures. For instance, the tree:
A
B
1
a
b
2
C
is topologically equivalent to: ((A)(((a)(b))(2))(C)). Lisp requires exactly as many parentheses as it needs to define such trees, and no more.
Below: these are my notes and references, that I’ve found and liked, and remembered to save, and need to remember to look at again, and reorganize if not organize.
Paul Graham’s Lisp FAQ
Ian Eure: Some cool things about Lisp
Steve Yegge: Lisp is not acceptable Lisp
C2: Smug Lisp Weenie
List Processing
So the short explanation of why this 1950s language is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn’t get stale. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, the Quicksort algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort. —Paul Graham
Lisp looks strange not so much because it has a strange syntax as because it has no syntax; you express programs directly in the parse trees that get built behind the scenes when other languages are parsed, and these trees are made of lists, which are Lisp data structures. —Paul Graham
Lisp humour
Using Emacs as a Lisp IDE
http://users.bigpond.net.au/d.keenan/Lambda/
http://www.dynamiclearningcenter.com/ - “features examples designed to introduce future developers to the power of Common Lisp” has a number of “coming soon” pages, but some examples of pattterns (see below) etc.
Lisp references, from Dynamic Learning Center
the journal Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation
Programming: You’re Doing it Wrong - a glower from McCarthy
LOGO is almost Lisp - see Programming.Logo
http://reddit.com/search?q=lisp
Pascal Costanza’s Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp
http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/
Every language tells a story, this one is Common Lisp’s
lisp tutorial - aka “Practical Common Lisp: the book”
Programming
human-order sorting. See also: Programming.Sort?
Steve Yegge: Lisp Wins
Common-Lisp Cookbook - “a collaborative project that aims to provide for Common Lisp something similar to the Perl Cookbook published by O’Reilly.”
see also: Emacs.ELisp
Books
see Books
Design Patterns
http://www.norvig.com/lisp_talk_final.htm
Design Patterns in Dynamic Programming
2 patterns in Lisp
See Also: Programming.DesignPatterns and Programming.FunctionalProgramming#DesignPatterns
Implementations
Movitz - on-the-metal Lisp dev-environment
LSharp - a Lispish .NET package
See Also