SearchYC.com

Is anyone else interested in a nice, easy to use and reliable Lisp library to talk to the Google Calendar API in an elegant way? I sure am, and if you are too and like to code in lisp, please email me to join the team adding this little gem to a growing list of very helpful Lisp libraries. (We'll of course use one of the existing xml lisp libraries)

Does anyone have some experience with using Lisp for software development on Android? I guess Clojure is always an option, but what are the alternatives?

I have a question for Lisp programmers. I am fairly new to programming and I have been playing around with Ruby. Mostly building simple Rails apps and scraping sites. I have read a lot about Lisp that intrigues me. However, it always seems like Lisp programmers are experienced programmers that become evangelists once they see how easy something was to accomplish in Lisp.

So my question is: Do you think that Lisp is a language you can cut your teeth on, or should I get more experience with Ruby and wait till I hit a wall, then turn to lisp to solve my problems?

To be fair, it seems the documentation for Lisp and ruby are quite different. Where Ruby seems to cater to new programmers with the coddling we need, while Lisp documentation is more sparse for veterans don't need intro material. Does that seem correct or an I mistaken? And I would love to hear the path Lisp programmers here took to become proficient.

I was inspired by some of Paul Graham's essays to start exploring Lisp, and I'm so glad I have. Even after just walking through one tutorial, it seems clear to me that Lisp (and functional programming in general?) has big advantages over Python, Perl, C++ and Java - the languages I've been using. The most surprising thing so far: after getting used to the idea of S-expressions, I feel more at home with Lisp than with traditional-syntax languages.

I want to start using Lisp in my own projects whenever I can. I've started with Common Lisp because it seems like the incumbent dialect for all-purpose programming. Though really attracted to Arc, I've gathered it's still relatively unstable, is this accurate? (If yes, I may still get involved with the community development.) Any other comments for a new Lisp programmer or about Lisp in general?

The first Lisp I ever used was LispKit. Over one weekend I implemented the SECD engine in BCPL, then by hand compiled the LispKit definitions of eval and apply into SECD code and typed them in. Hey Presto! Running Lsip.

But LispKit Lisp used dynamic scoping. If you have an unbound variable in an expression it uses the definition that was in force at the time of the call, not the definition that's in scope from the text of the surrounding code. This was incredibly useful at times, but made debugging and analysis difficult.

To the best of my (very limited) knowledge, modern Lisps use lexical scoping. Are there any current Lisps that use Dynamic scoping?

I could find that out for myself with a lot of searching and reading, but what I really want to know is this:

Do any of you use a system with dynamic scoping?

Regarding Norvig interview for reddit...

Do you agree with the answer to #2? He goes on to say that some former JPL employee named Ron attributed his high productivity to Lisp, but when he joined Google he found out C++ programmers there that were more productive than him in Lisp. Then he realized it was the programmers that mattered, not the programming language.

Now, isn't this a bit stretched? I'd believe if it was Python against Lisp, of course...

Given that the current Oracle lawsuit is seriously denting Jave's image, and given that one of the early intention for Java was to drag C++ developers half way to Lisp, do you think now would be a good time to consider Lisp on earnest? BTW, how does the lawsuit affect Clojure?

Disclaimer: I have not looked much at Lisp previously and in light of the potential ITA Software acquisition, I was curious about why Lisp is liked and for what domains of problems it is useful for. ITA's QPX is held as a common example but in some quick searching, I see no article showing why it was a preferable language to code in as opposed to some other higher-level language.

What is the reason for Clojure creating this optimism within the lisp community?

Has it succeeded where other lisps have failed?

Or is it just the JVM that all the sudden makes it cool?

If other lisps never made it into mainstream, why would Clojure all the sudden nail it?

It usually ends up being the lisp we point newbies towards. Wouldn't a scheme implementation like PLT-scheme or Chicken be just as good, if not even better? Clojure is too much of a moving animal to be considered newbie friendly in my opinion.

So why is Clojure considered to be a modern lisp?