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  Common Lisp is the best language to learn programming

Now that Conrad Barski's Land of Lisp (see my review on Slashdot) has come out, I definitely think Common Lisp is the best language for kids (or anyone else) to start learning computer programming.Between Land of Lisp, David Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation (really great book for people new to programming, available for free) and The Little LISPer (3rd edition, editions four and up use Scheme) you have three really great resources to get started.Lisp's synta...

   Common Lisp,Kid,Programming language,First     2011-10-31 00:07:12

  The roots of Lisp

(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp-- both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core is one of Lisp's distinguishing features, and the reason why, unlike other languages, Lisp has dialects.)In 1960, John McCarthy published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming somet...

   Lips,Root,McCarthy,AI,Artificial Intelligence     2011-10-25 10:35:13

  Why I love Common Lisp and hate Java

“Common what?” is a common reply I get when I mention Common Lisp. Perhaps rightly so, since Common Lisp is not all that common these days. Developed in the sixties, it is one of the oldest programming languages out there. In its heydays it was used mostly for Artificial Intelligence research at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the like, and therefore has a lingering association with AI. People not in AI shy away from Lisp. Common Lisp is a powerful and versatile program...

   Lisp,Java,Comparison,Common Lisp     2012-01-30 05:48:16

  Learning Ruby and Ruby vs Lisp

The company I work for has a lot of legacy Ruby code, and as Ruby has become kind of a mainstream language, I decided to get a book about it and learn how it works. As my learning resource, I chose The Ruby Programming language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto as that receives great customer reviews, covers Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9 and is authoritative because the language creator is one of the authors. The book makes a good read in general. There are plen...

   Ruby,Feature,Functional,OOP,Lisp,Difference     2011-12-12 07:42:01

  Lisp: It's Not About Macros, It's About Read

Note: the examples here only work with outlet lisp. Refer to your version of lisp/scheme’s documentation for how read works (and possibly other forms) I know it’s an old post by now, but something about the article Why I love Common Lisp and hate Java, part II rubbed me the wrong way. The examples just aren’t that good. The usage of macros is plain baffling, when a function would have been fine. The author admits this, but still does it. There’s a follow-up post wh...

   Lisp,Macro,Read,Java     2012-02-19 06:12:19

  JavaScript Is Not A Language

Recently people presented arguments for and against using CoffeeScript. I felt the argument against was pointless and obviously wrong, but I couldn't figure out why, and I thought the counterargument for was kind of toothless and irrelevant. I've figured out the real issue.The real argument for CoffeeScript is that JavaScript is not really a language.Years ago I read something which explained, in my opinion, why Lisp has never achieved the mainstream adoption its passionate advocates belie...

   JavaScript,Not a language,CoffeeScript,Model     2011-12-29 08:46:15

  GCC is compiled with C++ compiler

On 15 Aug, 2012, GCC merged a patch--Merge from cxx-conversion branch . This means GCC will be compiled with C++ compiler in the future, it also means that GCC will be implemented using C++. You may have following two puzzles: Why does GCC turn to C++? Without C++ compiler, how can we compile C++ codes? Why using C++? In GNU's C++ Conversion, we can find this description in the background section: Whether we use C or C++, we need to try to ensure that interfaces are easy to understan...

   GCC,C++,Compiler     2012-09-04 02:36:06

  Those famous Emacs users

I don't think using Emacs can improve one's programming skills, I don't think some famous people used Emacs before can provide something, either. But these famous people encouraged me to learn Emacs when I wanted to give it up. Here I created a list of famous Emacs users. Most of people in this list are not famous because they developed or used Emacs, but they are famous and also use Emacs. Joe Armstrong -- Erlang's author In The Setup, Joe mentioned that "I write books using XML markup in emacs...

   Emacs,History     2013-07-28 21:36:09

  The History of Programming Languages

This post is part of our ReadWriteHack channel, which is a resource and guide for developers. The channel is sponsored by the Intel AppUp Developer Program. As you're exploring these resources, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: AIR for AppUp: What You Need To Know Rackspace recently published a nice infographic on the evolution of programming languages. It starts with FORTRAN and COBOL and runs through Ruby on Rails (which, yes, is a framework and not a language). Unfo...

   History,Programming language,C,Java,Java     2011-07-28 09:00:23

  Text editor vs IDE

A meaningless editor war Many people like to debate which editor is the best. The biggest controversy is between Emacs and vi. vi supporters like to say: "Look it's very fast to type in vi, our fingers no need to leave the keyboard, we even no need to use the up,down,left and right keys" Emacs supporters often downplayed this and said: "What's the use of typing fast if I just need to press one key and it equals to dozens keys you type in vi?"In fact, there is another group of people who like to ...

   Editor,IDE,Structured editor,vi     2013-05-20 12:03:39