LispForum

Hello,

My name is Guido (Italian, but living most of the time in France), I am new to NewLisp, although I did a little CL back in university.

I am not a programmer by trade, but I have been using perl, bash, php and a little python to do the needful for me and my acquaintances.

My main coding efforts are in the text processing area.

I like very much the feeling of NewLisp, and would like to try it thoroughly, to see if it can substitute most of my tools, at least for most of my needs (I do not think it would be easy to substitute, for example, awk...)

I like Lisp in general, because of its beauty, expressivity and "feeling" (forgive me to say, one of the things I like most are the use of parentheses. I really can't understand those who hates them)

I am a little worried about one thing:

if a newbie like me wants to learn Lisp, in the future, would it be easy for him to learn Common Lisp as well (say, for doing something I could do better with SBCL, or other tools), if he starts with NewLisp?

I am sure a regular programmer could easily pick up the differences, and jump from NewLisp to CL with nor many problems.

But for a non-programmer like me, is there any reason I should start learning Common Lisp first, and then come to NewLisp, instead of starting from NewLisp right away?

Perhaps getting some "easy habits" that I could not use in CL, or some syntax I would be better off learning right away?

Thanks so much to the all Lisp developers and the LispForum community!

Guido

GuidoS wrote:But for a non-programmer like me, is there any reason I should start learning Common Lisp first, and then come to NewLisp, instead of starting from NewLisp right away?

I have to admit that I know nothing at all about NewLisp, but I do know the resources that exist for Common Lisp:

The books, On Lisp, Practical Common Lisp, and ANSI Common Lisp (which are free, and linked in various threads here.)

Many libraries of well-written code. CL-PPCRE, for example, implements regular expressions. You could conceivably replicate the functionality of AWK with the assistance of such a library, but does it work in NewLisp, or would you have to port it?

Emacs and Slime. Which is to say, a very capable integrated development environment. I was surprised recently when I tried to use Clojure, and found that Slime didn't work quite right. I think I'd rather shave all my hair off and eat it than deal with less than 100% Slime compatibility— especially if I were just starting out and constantly making mistakes and not remembering the function arguments.

Just my opinion, but if these things are not equally available in NewLisp, then learning CL first will be much easier.

Thank you so much, Duke.

I think I could use SLIME with newlisp.

As I said elsewhere, I like Lisp *especially* because of its syntax.
To me, it is still the most beautiful language around (putting aside all the other aspects), really because of its “aesthetics”.

And I feel parenthesis are a big part of that “feeling”.

When I read well written Lisp code I feel my awareness of the subject gets cleaner and tidier and lighter. I never experienced a similar thing with other languages. I am not belittling them, or criticising. It is just a deep personal feeling, that has been lasting since university times, back in the 90s.

After reading so many pages, on so many sites, I have decided that I will learn newlisp as my first lisp.

After having seen what newlisp can do (at newlisp.org and newlisper.wordpress.com) I am eager to see what I can do with it.

Thank you again!