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Which LISP?

Journal by turgid

Which LISP should I learn? Years ago I read about Scheme and wrote some hello world level code. I learned about lambda functions and currying. I also looked at racket. A few years ago, much of my day job involved the JVM and I was getting sick of Java so I got a book on Clojure, which is a very nice language, but I never wrote any.

A few days ago I downloaded and built the latest version of DrRacket.

Should I go straight to Haskell? Or what about other functional languages? Is Erlang worth a look?

I need something stimulating to distract my brain from the mundane nature of everyday life, and mediocre programming languages.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Subsentient on Saturday November 27 2021, @06:05PM (2 children)

    by Subsentient (1111) on Saturday November 27 2021, @06:05PM (#1200013) Homepage Journal

    I don't know any Lisp (seems to parenthesis-ey to me), but I can suggest a few languages worth checking out.

    • If you want a real challenge, learn Rust [rust-lang.org]. Not just enough to do hello world, enough where you understand its memory model and can do lifetime annotations effectively. Ignore the political bullshit, it looks like that part of the organization will implode soon anyways, and we'll end up with more decentralization.
    • If you want something interesting that you might not have seen before, check out Crystal [crystal-lang.org]. It's basically statically compiled Ruby with native performance.
    • If you want something whimsical but potentially useful, check out Fish shell [fishshell.com]. I'm currently having fun with Fish. It's really such a better shell than bash. The syntax is much nicer too. Reminds me heavily of Lua, and oh dear god do I love my Lua.
    • If you want a fascinating, tiny, fast compiling systems language that I've even considered contributing to, check out the V programming language [vlang.io].

    There's good stuff out there if you know where to look. ^^

    --
    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
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  • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Saturday November 27 2021, @06:18PM

    by Subsentient (1111) on Saturday November 27 2021, @06:18PM (#1200018) Homepage Journal

    I would also advise to pursue your interest in computing. If you have other interests, great, but if you're pining for a new language, my advice is to lean fully into it. It's good for the soul of a programmer. It's important to keep interesting new tools and innovations available to you to keep the fire alive. Don't let yourself get drowned in Java. :^)

    --
    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 05 2021, @08:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 05 2021, @08:54AM (#1202316)

    Oh man, an interesting language is J, another interesting language is Haskell, then there is, for instance, Factor.