28 Oct
2011
28 Oct
'11
2:17 p.m.
Ian King wrote, inresponse to Liam Proven:
The Little Lisper didn't make much sense to me
until after I'd read some
"real" books about Lisp (I really like the one DEC published). Just showing
someone how to car, cdr and cons isn't all that helpful. :-) -- Ian
In fact, Alan Kay talks (in his "Early History of Smalltalk" paper)
about how he learned Lisp at the University of Utah like this and
completely missed the point. Then he spent a short time at Stanford and
learned the deep ideas for the first time. So much so that if you divide
languages into broad families, then Smalltalk certainly belongs to the
Lisp family.
Of course, Scheme *is* Lisp rather than just part of the family. It just
isn't Common Lisp. I didn't read the "Structure and Interpretation of
Computers Programs" book (SICP) but did watch the online video of the
1986 course which was given at HP. One of the instructors, who was one
of the creators of Scheme and so should know better than me, mentions in
passing near the beginning that the particular Lisp used in the course
is known as Scheme but only uses Lisp to refer to it from then on.
I really enjoyed the course, but can't recommend it for everyone. It was
amazing to me that they seemed to go rather slowly starting from scratch
(supposing that the audience might not even know what programming is)
but managed to cover quite a bit of computer science in just 15 hours or
so. And in several parts they go deeper than what most students see in
four year courses. But the reason it might turn some people off is that
the pace is not slow at all - it only seems that way. It is very easy to
miss some important detail and be overwhelmed by everything that
follows, which can lead people to avoid this stuff in the future.
One language of the Lisp family that is often overlooked is Logo. It was
created for children and most implementations that were made were very
limited, but there is some very good learning material available (most
not online, unfortunately). Some of the more advanced material even
allows you to see what Lisp is about (the most significant difference
between Lisp and Logo to me is that EVAL in Lisp takes an expression and
a context in which to execute it while Logo's RUN only takes the
expression).
http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/products/books.html
I am a bit biased since I designed two Logo based computers (1983 and
1999).
-- Jecel