Enjoying Lisp programming is like enjoying prog rock or expressionist art; if you’re into it, you probably love it, and too bad about the squares who hate parentheses. Remember how the computer’s memory is kind of like a straight line, but programmers think in trees? That’s Lisp in a nutshell; it gives you an incredibly consistent way to think in trees. It’s as close to Zen as computing gets. Of all the languages in this essay, Lisp is the one I’d take to a desert island. It has the most to teach me about the hidden order of the universe.
I'm interested in functional programming and have used Scala, Coq and Haskell, and am interested in lisp, but I can't get into it. I've tried following along in SICP, but it puts me to sleep. So you or mk or anyone else have any other places I can look?
Have you tried Land of Lisp or The Little Schemer? Land of Lisp teaches Common Lisp by having you make games. Which is how I usually learn languages anyway. The Little Schemer is entirely columns of questions and answers. Some random ones: Is this a tup? () | Yes, it is a list of zero numbers. This special case is the empty tup. It wasn't really my cup of tea, but it's rather popular, so maybe it's yours. If you already know Scala and Haskell, and have a decent grasp on FP, would it be better to just tackle a project? Just say, write a web server or a CLI game, and learn what you need as you go? I tend to do that, to learn languages. It helps me not get bored, and with any project over a couple thousand lines, you'll learn at least as much as an introductory book.What is (quote +) | The atom +, not the operation +.