Open Thread, June 16-30, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

I would like to try some programming in Lisp, could you give me some advice? I have noticed that in the programming community this topic is prone to heavy mindkilling, which is why I ask on LW instead of somewhere else.

There are many variants of Lisp. I would prefer to learn one that is really used these days for developing real-world applications. Something I could use to make e.g. a Tetris-like game. I will probably need some libraries for input and output; which ones do you recommend? I want a free software that works out of the box; preferably on a Windows machine, without having to install a Linux emulator first. (If such thing does not exist, please tell me; and recommend me a second best possibility.)

I would also like to have a decent development environment; something that allows me to manage multiple source code files, does syntax highlighting, shows documentations to the functions I am writing. Again, preferably free, working out of the box on a Windows machine. Simply, I would like to have an equivalent of what Eclipse is for Java.

Then, I would like some learning resources, and information where can I find good open-source software written in Lisp, preferably games.

Peter Norvig's out-of-print Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp can be interesting reading. It develops various classic AI applications like game tree search and logic programming, making extensive use of Lisp's macro facilities. (The book is 20 years old and introductory, it's not recommended for learning anything very interesting about artificial intelligence.) Using the macro system for metaprogramming is a big deal with Lisp, but a lot of material for Scheme in particular doesn't deal with it at all.

The already... (read more)

11mstevens14y

My research suggests Clojure is a lisp-like language most suited to your requirements. It runs on the JVM so should be relatively low hassle on Windows. I believe there's some sort of Eclipse support but I can't confirm it. If you do end up wanting to do something with Common Lisp, I recommend Practical Common Lisp as a good free introduction.

5vi21maobk9vp14y

Well, if your goal is trying out for education, but on Windows, you could start with DrRacket. http://racket-lang.org/ It is a reasonable IDE, it has some GUI libraries included, open-source, cross-platform, works fine on Windows. Racket is based on Scheme language (which is a part of Lisp language family). It has a mode for Scheme as described in R6RS or R5RS standard, and it has a few not-fully-compatible dialects. I use Common Lisp, but not under Windows. Common Lisp has more cross-implementation libraries, it could be useful sometimes. Probably, EQL is the easiest to set up under Windows (it is ECL, a Common Lisp implementation, merged with Qt for GUI; I remember there being a bundled download). Maybe CommonQt or Cells-GTK would work. I remember that some of the Common Lisp package management systems have significant problems under Windows or require either Cygwin or MSys (so they can use tar, gzip, mkdir etc. as if they were on a Unix-like system)

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Open Thread, June 16-30, 2012

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Open Thread, June 16-30, 2012

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