this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Lisp Community
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A community for the Lisp family of programming languages.
Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language. Only Fortran is older, by one year.
History
- History of Lisp - John McCarthy's history of 12 February 1979.
- History of LISP at the Computer Histroy Museum
Associations and meetings
Resources - TODO
Related communities (dialects) - TODO
founded 5 years ago
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Guile Scheme -- lots of useful features built-in and a nice package ecosystem almost as good as Racket, it runs the Guix package manager which is the best package manager ever invented. Extremely well documented. Has an active user community and is actively maintained. Uses its own unique virtual machine that runs quite fast with JIT compilation. Stack traces are a little confusing in my opinion, but otherwise is easier to use than other Schemes I have tried. Plus it is an official GNU project, so great for software privacy and freedom.
Emacs with the "Geiser" and "Paredit" packages. Geiser is not as nice as SLIME with Common Lisp, but it works. The documentation browser is very good: it can navigate Info-doc, Man pages, and web pages all within the editor.
I started with Haskell, which is a functional language in the ML family, not a Lisp. One day I met a well-known Scheme enthusiast named Byrd (co-author of "The Reasoned Schemer" textbook and the "Minikanren" declarative logic programming system), and he almost convinced me that Scheme was better than Haskell. I was already an Emacs user and knew enough about Emacs Lisp that switching from Haskell to Scheme was very easy, and Guile's documentation made it even easier. I still use Haskell and love it a lot, but lately I have just been focusing on getting good at Scheme.