[Abqlispscheme] Scheme article on Linux.com

[Jim Prewett]

Hi Daryl,

Let me second Daniel's welcome and invitation to our next meeting - We'd 
love to have you join us!  I'm personally happy to have people just chat 
with us over the mailing list if a monthly meeting is too much to commit 
to. :)

Thanks for the pointer to the article!  I'm cureous what others think of 
guile; I've never played with it myself (except for a very brief hacking 
with GIMP :)  Does guile make the Schemers happy?  (Is it "real" scheme?)

I was a little disappointed that the article compared Scheme with Emacs 
Lisp, not Common Lisp - Emacs lisp is a dinosaur, a Coelacanth if you 
will, somehow still around today (but arguably shouldn't be :P )... 

One thing I find extremely frustrating with these introduction to Lisp 
articles is that they usually show you CAR and CDR, LIST, DEFUN, then they 
expect you to understand how to take that and make a "real" application.  
I'll tell you, when I started with Lisp (Scheme in UNM's CS 251 course), I 
HATED EVERY MINUTE!  I didn't understand why I couldn't just write a "for 
loop":  The best part is that I could have written a for loop, using DO, 
LOOP, ITERATE, or my own special construct (macro) and that I 
fundamentally didn't want to: MAPCAR is actually a good thing (TM) :)

If you are interested in a very practical starter for Common Lisp, I would 
highly recommend that you take a look at Peter Siebel's (IMO Excellent!) 
book titled "Practical Common Lisp".  The full text of the book is freely 
available on Peter's website at: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ . 

Good luck & we hope to see you in a couple of weeks!,
Jim

James E. Prewett                    Jim at Prewett.org download at hpc.unm.edu 
Systems Team Leader           LoGS: http://www.hpc.unm.edu/~download/LoGS/ 
Designated Security Officer         OpenPGP key: pub 1024D/31816D93    
HPC Systems Engineer III   UNM HPC  505.277.8210

On Thu, 3 Apr 2008, Daniel Lyons wrote:

> 
> On Apr 3, 2008, at 8:42 AM, Daryl Lee wrote:
> 
> > Greetings:
> >
> > I've been lurking on this list for a few weeks.  I'm fairly new to
> > Lisp/Scheme, and just had an introductory article published on  
> > linux.com
> > (http://www.linux.com/feature/130717).  The flurry of comments on  
> > the value
> > of Lisp/Scheme itself is very interesting to me, as a newbie.  I  
> > thought
> > this group might find it interesting, as well.
> 
> 
> Good to hear from you Daryl! I hope we'll be seeing you at our next  
> meeting on the 20th.
> 
> It looks like a nice intro article based on a quick glance. I would  
> say the remarks in those comments are more or less the standard set.
> 
> There was a post on ycombinator this morning which I think was pretty  
> insightful about this phenomenon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153812
> 
> -- 
> Daniel Lyons
> http://www.storytotell.org -- Tell It!
> 
> 
> 
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