newlispfanclub.alh.net

I hope I don't start flame war here ^^

I'm a CL newbie, and I discovered newLISp in a short time after I started learning CL.

My interest in CL is well ..., somewhere between academic & hobby.
I must admit I'm interested in CL due to Paul Graham's essays, and I already learned a bit Haskell in the university, so I think's it's reasonable to learn Lisp.

From what I can see now, Lisp is a very interesting language (praised by some of the famous people in computing world like Peter Norvig, Eric Raymond, or Alan Kay), mature (about 50 years of development history), available in many open source/commercial implementations, supported by lots of 3rd party libraries, etc.

And when I meet newLIsp. I can see newLisp as a 'practical Lisp'. Small, yet includes useful libraries like socket, regex, or GUI (not like CL, in which sometimes you still to find your own).

So, is there any benefit in learning CL, besides the reasons stated above ?

anta40 wrote:My interest in CL is well ..., somewhere between academic & hobby.

So, is there any benefit in learning CL, besides the reasons stated above ?

Considering that your stated area of interest is between academic and hobby, I'd say you have all you need (and more) in newLisp.

I think good principle is to be conservative about language change. To focus on problem one wants to solve and to switch on new language only if current language is significantly inferior for particular problem.

So, what is the problem you want to solve?

newLISP is a good gateway to CL, if that is what you are interested in. It gives you a simple environment to learn the basics of prefix notation and functional programming without the headache of finding an appropriate implementation and the difficulty of using CL libraries.

Kazimir Majorinc wrote: So, what is the problem you want to solve?

Well, general problems (AI problems are also OK, but not constrained to these one).

Since I think newLISP is easier to learn than CL, I would say start with newLISP and then, if or when you feel the pull towards something else (your programs are not fast enough so you need a compiler, you need some libraries that don't exist in newLISP but do exist in Common Lisp and you can't write them yourself, you want to explore some aspects of the Lisp paradigm that newLISP doesn't support, you've found something that newLISP can't do but CL can) move on to something else. That's what I'm doing. Still here! :)

cormullion wrote:Since I think newLISP is easier to learn than CL, I would say start with newLISP and then, if or when you feel the pull towards something else ...

It has a sense.