What dialect of Lisp is suitable for a beginner?

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Methodius
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Sep 27, 2011 3:18 am
Location: Romania

What dialect of Lisp is suitable for a beginner?

Post by Methodius » Tue Oct 04, 2011 5:09 am

Hello.
As I said, I have more questions about Lisp, and one of them is the topic title. I am a beginner not only in Lisp, but also in programming.
I read a bit about Lisp, I liked what I heard, but I stayed with this confusion. I understand that there are several variants (dialects) of Lisp and do not know what to choose.
Any advice would be welcome.

nikond3s
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Oct 03, 2011 10:05 am

Re: What dialect of Lisp is suitable for a beginner?

Post by nikond3s » Tue Oct 04, 2011 5:54 am

Hi I'm also a beginner. I started with Lisp a few days ago. For my experiments I choose Common Lisp and CLISP. Because I have a strong Java Background I use Eclipse as my IDE of choice with a simple plugin called "dandelion" (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dandelion-ecl/). You just need to install the plugin via the eclipse update facility and you are ready to go. The plugin won't give you much but the bare necessities which is enough for me at the moment.

regards

Methodius
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Sep 27, 2011 3:18 am
Location: Romania

Re: What dialect of Lisp is suitable for a beginner?

Post by Methodius » Wed Oct 05, 2011 3:02 am

Thank you.
I'll start with CLisp. Unfortunately, I have no background in any programming language. I do not think I'm doing with Eclipse, which I heard vague. Is there any IDE for CLisp more suitable for a beginner who has never ever programmed?
I forgot to say my OS is Ubuntu. If there is any CLisp IDE in Ubuntu would be perfect.

nikond3s
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Oct 03, 2011 10:05 am

Re: What dialect of Lisp is suitable for a beginner?

Post by nikond3s » Wed Oct 05, 2011 10:47 pm

IMHO there are not many good IDE choices for Lisp out there. If you have not found it yet you should visit www.cliki.net. This wiki is my current "knowledge base" for Lisp, it containts many useful links and information about Lisp.

Eudoxia
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Dec 04, 2011 2:58 pm
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Re: What dialect of Lisp is suitable for a beginner?

Post by Eudoxia » Sun Dec 04, 2011 10:08 pm

The main IDE for Lisp is emacs. If you don't want that, my suggestion would be to use Kate + copy-pasting code to the terminal or a Qt editor called CLedit. It's very unknown, and has a lot of missing features (For example, there is only a Save As function, no Save function that can be triggered with Crtl+S the way I usually do). I've found Kate to be the best non-emacs Common Lisp editor. It essentially has everything the other editors (LispIDE, CLedit, gedit) lack: Supports both ;; and |# comments, code folding, the only thing that is lacking is proper parenthesis matching, but that can be changed in the Settings tab. It's hard to see it, though, until you change the highlighting color.

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