I haven’t posted in over a month mostly because I’ve been spending a lot of my evenings studying Lisp. Althought the first post here was on Haskell, it actually would have been more appropriate had it been on Lisp, because Lisp (Scheme) was a largely responsible for me rediscovering the joy in programming. So I’ve been thinking about writing a Lisp post for a while, something like a “Road to Lisp” response. But instead of a lengthy post I’ll just get to the point and actually respond to the survey. Thus…

I, (spacemanaki), do solemnly offer my responses to “The Road to Lisp Survey”:

When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?

In the winter of 2009 I read The Little Schemer and wrote all of the exercise programs out on paper in Scheme. Later I actually installed MIT Scheme and played around in the REPL.

Many of us had multiple run-ins with Lisp before it “stuck”. The “stick” date is of most interest, but you can share earlier encounters if you like.

I had an early encounter with Scheme in college. But we spent less than a month with it (needless to say they weren’t teaching a variation on 6.001 at the Big State Java School) and I didn’t appreciate it as much as I did after The Little Schemer. At the time I was curious, but somehow got distracted. All I took away was cons, car, cdr, and tail-call optimization. I didn’t loathe its syntax though, as many programmers do. Maybe that alone was a sign of things to come.

What led you to try Lisp?

I watched some iteration of Douglas Crockford’s talk based on his book JavaScript: the Good Parts. He put up a slide with code similar to this:

[code]var digit_name = function () { var names = [‘zero’, ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, ‘four’, ‘five’, ‘six’, ‘seven’, ‘eight’, ‘nine’]; return function(n) { return names[n]; }; }(); alert(digit_name(3));[/code]

And he said that if there was only one thing the audience should take away from the talk, it was this. I paused the video and had to take a long look at the code, because I had never seen anything like it. The first sentence in the Wikipedia article on closures) is a gem: “In computer science, a closure is a first-class function with free variables that are bound in the lexical environment.” This was mostly incomprehensible to me.

On Crockford’s site there is a review of the Little Schemer, and I picked it up with a desire to better understand what he meant that JavaScript was more like Scheme than like Java or that it was “Lisp in C’s clothing.” After reading it and its sequel, The Seasoned Schemer, I not only understood closures, but was completely delighted by Scheme.

What other languages have you been using most?

I’m paid to write Java and C at my day job, and occasionally do some simple web projects using JavaScript (with HTML/CSS). I’ve been staying up late learning Haskell and Ruby.

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?\ I know this is hard to quantify. Just wing it.

I’ve read the aforementioned Little Schemer and its sequel. I’ve since moved on to the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; I’ve only read two (small) fifths of that, but I’m far from giving up yet, it’s just slow going. Most recently I’ve started to learn Common Lisp from Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp and Peter Seibel’s Practical Common Lisp. I would say I have only just begun my study.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

I think Lisp is very compelling. I think it’s delightful and incredibly fun. I don’t feel frustrated by the language, instead I feel empowered and challenged.