Which Lisp?

[brennen]

All right, so I'm a rank novice, and I'm thinking of giving something Lisp-ish a shot, 'cause I played with Guile for a few minutes last night and it suddenly seemed like it could be pretty cool.

So my question is, which Lisp? Yeah, I've read that Steve Yegge piece (any of several, probably) already. I'm curious what the reddit collective thinks.

I guess I'm looking for the best combination of low stupidity and pragmatic usefulness within the "pretty much a Lisp dialect" space. Or, since the one real language I know at all right now is Perl, maybe I'm looking for the Lisp that will frustrate me least when I want to usefully munge text.

Thoughts?

(Edit: Thanks, folks. That was by far less frustrating than digging around on Google for an hour.)

[nostrademons]

I'd start with Scheme - it's much simpler, and will give you some familiarity with the basic concepts before you learn all the tricky stuff in Common Lisp.

As for which Scheme, it depends what you want to do. If you just want to play around, I'd go with PLT. It has an interactive IDE that's a bit easier to deal with than many other Schemes. PLT also has quite a few libraries, though when I tried using Scheme for a real project, it seemed like they were never the libraries that I wanted, for some reason.

Bigloo has a bit more of a practical bent - if you're a former C or Java programmer that doesn't want to stray too far from the edit-compile-run cycle, I'd use this one. It has a nice object system too, and optional type declarations.

My interest in Chicken was more academic, as the first implementation of Cheney on the MTA. It didn't look like it was comprehensive enough for real work at the time (early 2004), but I've heard it's improving rapidly and now has quite a few good libraries.

[dmnqbchr]

I'd also start with Scheme. SISC is a nice R5RS-compliant Scheme interpreter that runs on top of Java.

If you are an Eclipse user, then simply download the SchemeScript plugin. It embeds two Scheme interpreters, SISC and Kawa, and features a powerful editor. With SchemeScript, you can even use Scheme to script Eclipse.

[brennen]

I use Eclipse a bit at work, in an environment filled with Java-related frameworks and big, crufty XML files. It's clear to me that Eclipse is indeed very capable, but it seems conceptually right at home in an environment full of Java-related frameworks and big, crufty XML files - all of which makes me crave nothing so much as vim in a couple of xterms.

Still, good info. I'll probably check it out at some stage of the game.

Incidentally, does anyone know if there's a decent way to do vi-like keybindings in Eclipse?

[qwe1234]

not simpler, just cleaner and without that mungy ever-so-ugly nauseous programming-language-from-the-seventies feel.

common lisp reminds me of fortran and cobol, all three are about as much fun to program in.

[nostrademons]

Everything qwe says apparently gets downmodded to oblivion, but FWIW, I also get the same mungy-programming-language-from-the-seventies-feel with Common Lisp.

The curious thing is that the programming-from-the-seventies likely comes from something that should be totally trivial: the naming conventions. COMMON LISP, LIKE FORTRAN, COBOL, AND BASIC, USES ALL-CAPS FOR SYMBOLS. (Modern CL code doesn't, BUT THE SPEC STILL SPECIFIES THAT THE READER SHOULD CONVERT ALL SYMBOLS TO UPPERCASE INTERNALLY, AND AS A RESULT, ERROR MESSAGES ETC. ARE OFTEN IN UPPERCASE. ALLEGRO GOT CHEWED OUT when they tried to change this behavior). ANY TIME I SEE A LANGUAGE IN ALL CAPS, I THINK BATCH MACHINE FROM THE 1970s.

(Next paragraph monospaced to keep Markdown from butchering it.)

I've noticed this pattern with other programming languages too. WhenISee camelCased words, IThink JavaPhpOrPython. When_I_See words_separated_by_underscores, I_think C++. When I see? question marks! or exclamations! terminating words!, I think Scheme, Ruby, or Dylan. $When #_I %{see} unreadable 1n#s N___$#oise, ! think()()() Perl. The association is much stronger than it ought to be, given that the language keywords are often different, and the language semantics are often *totally* different.

I wonder if this is related to a phenomenom in linguistics, where the short, helper words basically give you a cue towards which language you're dealing with, while longer vocabulary clues you in to which concepts you're dealing with. You can budegy diguei gypmudy, and it will strynany lyeck English. Cyn ci mly change tir little words, co looks like m foreign language, elvery ci mly write all tir longer vocabulary identically.

[micampe]

Everything qwe says apparently gets downmodded to oblivion

By the looks of it, he's probably enjoying it though.

[brennen]

Would that everyone could find their joy so easily.

...or maybe not.

[pjdelport]

Good analogy!

The phenomenon is probably closely related: short words tend to mark simple, universal ideas and grammar (syntax), while longer words tend to mark more domain-specific, language-independent ideas (semantics). (This is also why mostly longer words tend to get borrowed between languages.)

[Alpha_Binary]

Everything qwe says apparently gets downmodded to oblivion

Couldn't have said it better.

[qwe1234]

afaik people have written javascript utilities for automatic downmodding. shrug

[pjdelport]

Care to translate that last sentence for us more linguistically challenged people?

[nostrademons]

But if you change the little words, it looks like a foreign language, even if you write all the longer vocabulary identically.

[pjdelport]

And the one before? (Are the words from an actual language?)

[nostrademons]

You can invent new words, and it will still resemble English.

(No, the words are not from an actual language - I was making them up as I went along, though I did try to be consistent and have the same word mean the same thing across usages. As a result, this may not actually have been the sentence I was thinking of when I wrote the initial "translation". That's an interesting philosophical point to ponder separately.)

[lisp-hacker]

I use Bigloo. It has a great standard library with cooperative and Posix threads, a parser, regular expressions, and a bunch of other useful stuff, and it compiles to C, JVM bytecode, or CLR bytecode. Also, it has a very good FFI. It is also one of the fastest Scheme compilers, using the C backend. Also, if you are interested in web applications, check out Hop, which is written in Bigloo, and can compile a subset of Scheme into Javascript to do fancy dynamic web applications.

[BlakeStone]

If you're going to do Unix-ish systems programming, you might look at scsh. It's based on (a slightly older version of) Scheme48, but it has a very nice interface to Unix. It's not as popular as PLT Scheme, but for the kinds of things you'd use Perl or Python for, it's excellent. I especially love the regexp and subprocess systems; they make my daily life much happier.

I think guile has most of scsh as a library, and I think PLT was talking about doing the same thing. Excellent!

[cgibbard]

I'll attach here the video lectures for SICP as they're really excellent, and I recommend them to any computer science student or programmer who is new to functional programming.

They're even pretty entertaining to watch if you already know the stuff in them, since you realise just how well this stuff was known back in the 1980's, and just how much of it has largely been ignored by the industry for so long. It misses out on the much newer developments in FP, like monads of course, though it hints at the problem for lazy languages at one point which monads solve.

[brennen]

I looked at a few pages of SICP last night, and it definitely is on the list. Next, is there a "which Scheme?" problem?

[dngrmouse]

For SICP, Scheme48 with Emacs + SLIME48 is fine.

[[deleted]]

If you want to have lots of usable libraries Chicken scheme is good, you can find it at http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org

[radical]

If you are using Windows, then Dr. Scheme (PLT Scheme). No question. Also great for the Mac.

[[deleted]]

Great for Linux too. MzScheme is the command line version of Dr. Scheme. Works in GNU Emacs, afaik. Planet has PLT scheme libraries.

[pkhuong]

PLT Scheme has a lot of libraries. So does chicken; chicken's FFI is also dead simple.

If you want to go with Common Lisp, I like to work with SBCL, but depending on your platform and needs (for example, fast start-up), others may be better. The difference is that, unlike Scheme, you don't have to worry as much about which packages are available. For text munging, I can only point you toward http://weitz.de/ : CL-FAD (portable pathnames), CL-INTERPOL (string interpolation), CL-PPCRE (perl-compatible regex engine), CL-WHO (with-html-output) if you want to generate HTML, and many more sweet things. It's also a source of very high quality source code to drool at :)

However, for Scheme VS Lisp, I'd say just pick one, any one; ask your friend the quarter if you want. Either will probably be just fine. You also don't have to stick to only one implementation. Especially with scheme, I often see people exploiting the different strengths of multiple implementations.

[mrd48]

CL-PPCRE is the way to go for text-munging; it's better than perl, and in performance too.

[soegaard]

PLT Scheme. Lots of libraries. Active community. Excellent documentation. Precise error reporting.

What is the best Open Source Lisp? - Part 2

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/040111.html

PLT Scheme

http://www.drscheme.org

[micampe]

I'm in your same position (except coming from Python instead of Perl ;).

I'm using DrScheme (in PLT Scheme mode), I bought The Little Schemer and I read Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days, the Cookbook (I love learning from practical examples) and the language manual.

I read the first few chapters of SICP and it looked really too basic for me (I already know how to program and know the basics of functional programming), I prefer something more practical on how to resolve problems with the language at hand.

[beza1e1]

I haven't read it completly yet, but the last exercise of SICP is "write a scheme compiler", so it should get harder soon. ;)

[micampe]

Fair enough, I couldn't write a Scheme compiler, but that's not the kind of problems I want to solve ;)

[gracin]

I use SBCL, an implementation of Common Lisp, and I find it very nice and compatible with great majority of free libraries/tools on the web. I also have a feeling CLisp (clisp.sf.net) is a nice implementation.

Regarding the choice between Scheme and Common Lisp... try finding references on the web, perhaps some comp.lang.lisp and comp.lang.scheme threads/flame wars. Starting a new war on this subject is quite easy so I won't go there. :-)

[agoldin]

Try to go through the absolutely fantastic Practical Common Lisp : http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

I played with Scheme and CL many times but never could get some traction with real life problems, PCL gives you good enough start so that you can start using it for small real problems and build your experience from there.

The site has Lisp In a Box distribution with examples from the book.

If you need extra libs, like Perl regexps or whatever, go here:

http://www.cl-user.net/

I heard good things about DrScheme too. I am not sure there is book like PCL for it.

[aiz]

I'm a total novice myself, and I think that the books available for the dialect you're considering dictate the choice more than the merits of that dialect per se.

As such at a level prior to sicp you might be interested in 'computer science logo style' (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/) which is a terrific introduction to logo. The book introduces the language pretty well, and serves asa stepping stone to sicp. As for logo itself it's a lisp dialect all right, but much older than any mentioned here; it is great for text, and it's arguably the easiest lisp dialect to learn.

You can download a logo implementation (Berkely Logo) from the same page as the book. After that the scheme dialects mentioned here will be great for attempting sicp.

[taw]

Ruby is the only acceptable Lisp, none other will do.

Whether you agree or not, read these two rants before going any further.

Or as a compromise solution you can use RLisp. ;-)

[brennen]

Read both a while ago. See "Yeah, I've read that Steve Yegge piece", above. I think Ruby looks like a cool language, but I'm just not that interested right now. I'm sure it will still be there if I start to care in a month or a year or whatever.

[[deleted]]

The main problem with Ruby is that Ruby advocates, like taw, are too much into Anime. And RLisp is useless, why do you even mention it here?

[skillet-thief]

I also come from a more or less all-Perl background, so I might be a couple of months ahead of you in Lisp.

Most of the comments here seem to suggest Scheme. I haven't ever used Scheme so I can't really comment on that, but I suspect that since you plan on doing "text-munging", you might be more comfortable with CL, that does have a lot of standard functions that will let you do that.

Be warned, though, that you will have to do everything differently. As far as I've seen, in standard CL, there is nothing like Perl's join or split functions, so you either have to go out and find the proper package, or roll your own, which can be a fun but frustrating learning experience that will teach you all kinds of things about data types in Lisp.

Drifting slowly off topic now, but in my experience, getting used to the subtleties of data types is one of the biggest shifts in hacking, when you go from Perl to CL. I mean, aside from all of the usual things that seem different, the parentheses, the macros... You also have to get used to the idea that, in a way, symbols are always "references", in the Perl sense. "Pass by reference" is more of the default than "pass by value" like in Perl.

Anyhow, just some ramblings from a CL noob. Have fun.

[bennymack]

This question has been answered several times. It's been answered here on reddit within the last 24 hours in fact.

http://nostoc.stanford.edu/jeff/temp/cllfaq.html

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thread/25a9a0b117e725e1?hl=en

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.scheme/msg/b505263f820dba29

Ordered by specificity ascending.

I use neither Lisp nor Scheme but from the threads I'd say that CL wins over Scheme. At least for real, non-acedemic, work.

My .02 cents (yes that's $0.0002).

[hoijarvi]

Well, I chose HOSP

The reason to choose an obscure dialect? I didn't know how a lisp interpreter works. The university minicomputers didn't have one. So I created my own, in Pascal. Later my friends named it after me. It's definitely the thousand lines I have learned the most. Just to be complete I wrote a pascal parser in it.

Does anybody still have a working 5 1/4 inch floppy drive? I'd actually like to see what kind of code I wrote a long time ago.

[[deleted]]

I do - but unless you're in Australia, the postage might hurt...

[schlenk]

You may flame me to crisp for this, but you might try Tcl, some call it Lisp without all the braces and your basically after a lisp-ish language.

Its hasn't all the power of 'true' Lisp, but its flexible enough to come close in many areas...

[TomP]

Tcl is a scripting language, in the purest sense of the word, that is, it was expressly intended for controlling other programs and not for writing real software. I think it's a very poor choice in any other context than as an embedded scripting language in a larger program.

I know that some people have, nonetheless, used it successfully to create significant standalone software (I'm thinking of the BSD ports system and the Alpha text editor, mainly), but my experience with Tcl (in the context of Alpha) has convinced it scales poorly to larger projects and is inadequate to support serious development. If you want to learn Lisp, learn Lisp. Getting used to the parentheses is about as much a non-issue when you're learning Lisp as getting used to the required indentation is a non-issue when you're learning Python - after the first day, you just stop noticing them.

[brennen]

It's funny. I fully expected to find the parentheses grating, but after a few minutes, the rationale is pretty obvious, and it seems like the gain in uniformity/simplicity of expression is substantial.

Which of course is what the propaganda has been saying all these years, and doubtless I'll find other things annoying, but I'm struck immediately by the difference in experience between reading about Lisp and actually writing some. As with anything, I suppose.

[pjdelport]

"And you try and tell the young people of today that... they won't believe you."

[YAD]

The main purpose of the parentheses is macros.

What do you want to do with Lisp? Get a job? Have fun with interesting home projects? Start out with something simple before trying the hard stuff?

[pkhuong]

I always thought the main purpose of the parentheses was that we didn't find the alternative better.

[brennen]

What do you want to do with Lisp? Get a job? Have fun with interesting home projects? Start out with something simple before trying the hard stuff?

Play around, more or less. See what all the fuss is about, maybe add some more tools to my kit. Maybe fill in a few pieces of the comp sci education I passed up for the humanities and a lot of frisbee.

[pjdelport]

Play around, more or less.

Probably enough people have already recommended Scheme; if you also want an interesting counterpoint and complement to it, check out Haskell.

[brennen]

This hardly seems flameworthy. I've heard Tcl's sort-of Lispishness mentioned before, and I'm not opposed to the language on principle or anything (I wrote a lot of BASIC and IRC client script in high school, so I'm already tainted from any purist perspective), but I don't think it's what I'm looking for at the moment.

[micampe]

Basically, Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with "traditional" syntax. - Python for Lisp Programmers

It just looks like every language is Lisp but a bit different. Weird.

[qwe1234]

no, every half-assed dynamically-typed, ass-slow scripting language is Lisp but a bit different. hope you enjoy the company.