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comment by psudo
psudo  ·  3206 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: PSA: Starting the search for the next Hubski team member

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?





rob05c  ·  3206 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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:

    What is (quote +) | The atom +, not the operation +.

    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.