Sup Fedi,

[abraemer@mathstodon.xyz]

@pfr as for becoming a member: Personally I found Practical Common Lisp to be a good start of my lisp journey. It absolutely drew me in with the sheer efficiency of the code (by which I mean how much is accomplished with comparatively very little code). You can read it for free: at https://gigamonkeys.com/book/

[pfr@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@abraemer Amazing! thank you

[mgrinder@mastodon.social]

@pfr Racket, which is derived from Scheme, has a whole introduction to programming textbook available here: https://htdp.org/2026-2-25//Book/index.html

[mgrinder@mastodon.social]

@pfr MIT has open online course materials based on the textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs which also uses Scheme: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/

[mousebot@todon.nl]

@pfr you can follow lisp related hashtags on fedi (lisp, commonLisp, scheme, guile, emacs), or there are irc or matrix rooms if they're your thing.

there's https://gigamonkeys.com/book/, very well written and fine if you're not a programmer, also https://files.spritely.institute/papers/scheme-primer.html. (for both you'd want to get a lisp or scheme env set up so you can follow along.)

also the little schemer book is cool too, including pedagogically.

(i also learned lisp as a non-programmer, i think it's great)

[iredave@theforkiverse.com]

@pfr why LISP?

[teajaygrey@snac.bsd.cafe]

Where? Oh gosh, I think there was a mailing list that was popular some years back? Maybe one of the ones listed here: https://common-lisp.net/independent-lists

Long ago (like, MC68K era) I seem to recall the low level Macintosh stuff being implemented in Forth (which is sort of like a dialect of a Lisp, maybe more specifically Scheme? My memories in such realms are soooo old, don't quote me on that; since I have probably forgotten more than I once used to know having toiled in such realms.).

@cwebber@social.coop seems more up to date on more recent goings on with Lisp variants than I and has made mention of Guile (https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/) as something more contemporary that was news to me! Chances are, there's a lot of other more recent stuff I am pretty clueless about that others' are exploring and extending.

At least personally, I found the Lisp Machines (e.g. LMI [Lisp Machines International], Symbolics [the first dot com domain!] and to a lesser extent Texas Instruments) that evolved out of MIT's CADR research fascinating! It is possible, though with dubious copyright legality, to run OpenGenera (the Symbolics OS, more or less) on AMD64 hardware running Linux. Those machines, despite their name, ran other languages too, including C compilers and even supposedly had hardware bounds checking! So they weren't exploitable via common buffer overflow stack smashing techniques, supposedly? They were also open, down to their microcode. Contrasted to a lot of contemporary systems with their (U)EFI and BIOS being binary blobs completely obscured from users? A very different world. Apparently a lot of early X Windows bugs were identified and fixed thanks to Lisp Machines. The UNIX Hater's Handbook was largely written by individuals who were supposedly privileged enough to use Lisp Machines users. Such workstations were not inexpensive for their era, I seem to recall some Lisp machines costing in the range of $60,000+ USD, in the 1980s. Also, probably my favorite GPU name ever was for Lisp Machines the: FrameThrower. From Evans & Sutherland (the Sutherland being Ivan Sutherland, of Sketchpad [one of the first GUI systems and probably the first object-oriented programming system] notoriety, and he was also Alan Kay's doctoral advisor IIRC). At toorcon 8, dnm and I were planning to talk more extensively about Lisp Machines and some of the good ideas from a security perspective that seemed to have been lost and or forgotten by others in the ensuing decades; but we kind of got derailed by Captain Crunch getting added to the panel in the 11th hour who hadn't done any prep with us and just kind of talked about whatever he felt like instead. Ah well. If you want a pop culture reference, a Lisp Machine also makes a cameo in the 1985 movie Real Genius where the reclusive Lazlo Hollyfeld hacker archetypal character can be seen with such a thing displaying some pretty groovy graphics!

I dunno about membership! It's probably a little too ad hoc and maybe closer to a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) paradigm? Though I may be entirely incorrect about that. ^_^

[beardie_jamie@mastodon.scot]

@pfr paging @lproven ...

[drizzy@cyberplace.social]

@pfr I suppose it might help to know motivation? I really only started LISPing after I started using #emacs and wanted to tweak it to my liking. So for me LISP is really emacs lisp. Not even sure what the differences are never bothered to find out 🤣

[pfr@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@iredave I guess I can't really give a good reason, other than I'm interested in it and that seems like a good place to start.

[slash909uk@mastodon.me.uk]

@pfr This new book just dropped about the history of Lisp. As a decades old C programmer it is mind expanding!

https://mstdn.ca/@cdegroot/116086771614712320

[inecas@mstdn.social]

@drizzy @pfr this ^^^. It's the most practical way of leveraging list in day to day work, and once you're indoctrinated, you see it everywhere.

And of course https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/index.html is a bible for every LISP enthusiast.

[lproven@social.vivaldi.net]

@drwho @pfr @beardie_jamie

The best summary I know:

«
• Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.

• Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: 'the car that's always in front of you.'

• Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle.
»

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-interpreter-for-emacs.html

For a pleasant intro, I hear Scheme is fairly clean.

Clojure is trendy but arguably sort of not really a real Lisp any more: maybe better if you have a specific job to get done. But I hear the community is quite welcoming.

The cognoscenti all recommend SICP as the Bible to get started.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs

I tried. I found it utterly unreadable. But then, I am a very poor programmer.

I am not one of the cognoscenti. I'm just an onlooker. I am nowhere near smart enough.

[lproven@social.vivaldi.net]

@drwho @pfr @beardie_jamie

The illuminated ones also recommend learning Emacs first. I have tried. Repeatedly. I find it totally impenetrable, too. The only things that helped at all in any way were the excellent macOS version, Aquamacs, now sadly effectively moribund:

https://aquamacs.org/

And for non-Mac-users, the mad guru of this stuff, Xah Lee, who created ErgoEmacs:

https://ergoemacs.github.io/

It makes GNU Emacs kind of usable, but, for the Enlightened Ones, you're getting to know an impure, polluted vision.

But it's comprehensible. May work for you.

[lproven@social.vivaldi.net]

@teajaygrey @cwebber @beardie_jamie

Violating your wishes:

> Long ago (like, MC68K era) I seem to recall the low level Macintosh stuff being implemented in Forth

Not quite. The early PowerPC Macs ran OpenFirmware, and it uses Forth for its configuration language. It's not _written_ in it, no.

68K Macs do not use it, and the OS was implemented partly in Object Pascal, not Forth.

> (which is sort of like a dialect of a Lisp,

No, not really. The main things Forth and Lisp share is _not_ using algebraic notation, and typically being partly implemented in themselves... and that's about all, TTBOMK.

> maybe more specifically Scheme?

No. Only in the sense that Scheme is a minimalist sort of Lisp and Forth is also minimalist.

> My memories in such realms are soooo old, don't quote me on that

... sorry...

[lproven@social.vivaldi.net]

@inecas @drizzy @pfr @beardie_jamie

> And of course https://
mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/index.html is a bible for every LISP enthusiast.

I replied before seeing this, but I feel it validates my point rather well. :-D

I bailed after the introductory page, which was gobbledegook to me. Seriously, I read fast, I read a lot, and the only book that I bounced off this hard was my first Patrick O'Brian novel, with its over-page-length single sentences.

The only readable comprehensible Lisp book I've seen I could follow is one I never managed to buy on dead tree.

http://landoflisp.com/

[lproven@social.vivaldi.net]

@pfr @beardie_jamie

> Where does the internet church of Lisp congregate

If anywhere, Hacker News. :-)

It's owned by Paul Graham, one of the most famous Lisp advocates.

https://paulgraham.com/avg.html

HN is implemented in his dialect of Lisp, called Arc. (On top of Steel Bank Common Lisp.)

[pfr@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@lproven @drwho @beardie_jamie I suppose I should look at Emacs. But I'll always be a vim user 😉

[inecas@mstdn.social]

@lproven @drizzy @pfr @beardie_jamie Yes, it's not a light reading, and much more about the concepts on how (no only) lisp is implemented, rather than just use it. But the question was about the church of Lisp, and needs to be mentioned as one of the holy books. And once one gets over the initial bar, it's actually quite eye-opening.

[rosactrl@social.vivaldi.net]

@pfr I think Land of Lisp is still a good introduction https://nostarch.com/lisp.htm