The Viamentis Blog

After finishing up most of Practical Common Lisp (except the practical chapters) I was looking at other options to sharpen my lisp fu. Then I bumped into Touretzky’s book. It’s simply awesome. If you’re looking at a step-by-step guide for starting off with Lisp, I would recommend you go for this instead of Peter Siebel’s.

But a look at PS’ book wouldn’t hurt either, because you would need the amazing Lispbox IDE that is recommended with Practical Common Lisp. After you finish this off, you can go back to PCL and you will gain more perspective. I should say I’m finally getting it: I can see why someone said “Coding in lisp is like crack. You feel it’s power once, you don’t even want to look at other langauges”.

Well, I certainly do want to look at others, but I’ve done six chapters of Touretzky, and I have to say I’m lovin it. the book is simply awesome. Maybe a bit too basic for smarter hackers, but I always liked the “teach, give some exercises, teach” approach better. I would have a good idea of how I’m progressing. Okay, see you after I finish the rest of the book. Bye!

As you all know, I’ve been messing around with some Lisp lately. I should admit I still don’t ‘get’ the power of the language yet, but I’m very impressed with how you can easily translate mathematical formulas, theorems, algorithms easily into a lisp equivalent. Of course, it’s a very small part of what Lisp does, but the ease of this translation promises that it would be a powerful language to express your ideas in.

Anyways, I also signed up for comp.lang.lisp (from now on called c.l.l) through the google interface. It’s a very convenient way to read Usenet groups. I’m simply blown away by the signal-to-noise ration of c.l.l vis-a-vis, say Rails list or Ruby list, for that matter. Ruby and Rails lists are mostly “hey! cool framework/language! how do I do this!” or “hey! I just put my code on rubyforge! check it out!” or something equally mundane.

But if you look at c.l.l, you see that most of the topics are deep software engineering topics. Things like static vs dynamic typing (though there are silly topics like someone wanting to change clisp logo because it has religious symbolism – please!), functional programming, how lisp concepts relate to Haskell, etc. I mean, the entire discussion is very engaging, and it takes a lot of effort for a guy like me to understand what they are talking about. Needless to say, I’ll be lurking and figuring out this Lisp thingy

Some of you might have observed that my blog posts are less frequent than usual. Patience ladies and gentlemen, for I will be back. All I can say for now is that it is a very important time for me, and am learning some hard lessons, and doing interesting things.

I’m sorry I couldn’t post more SICP exercise solutions, because the problems are pretty tough, and it’s not giving the satisfaction that I’ve learnt scheme, as I’m spending my time thinking about these exercises.

But I am working through the book “Practical Common Lisp”, and I’m very impressed with the book & CL (common lisp). I will post more about lisp-related things as I progress through the book and work on a small app to get my head around the langauge. Lets see how it works out.

Meanwhile, you guys have fun, do come back once in a while to check this blog out. I am looking at a long-scheduled upgrade of Typo pretty soon. It’s about time I got my hands dirty withsome sysadmin work