A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp

A blog post reviewing four dialects of Lisp that a beginner wanting to start with Lisp can choose: Common Lisp, Clojure, Racket, and ELisp. The author, Elia Scotto, interestingly doesn’t include Scheme, although he does present Racket as a Scheme dialect (which of course it is).

Does the choice too make initially matter?

Dialect matters, but not as much as a beginner might think. Learning Lisp is about learning a new type of programming. A new way of thinking about problems using code. You will learn the fundamental concepts with any dialect. Then, once you have learned one, it will be relatively easy to switch to another.

I think most Lisp devotees would agree with the sentiment that it’s about a new relationship with code; I’m not totally convinced that Racket is a good place to start, given that it’s essentially several languages; and ELisp only makes sense if you are already a devoted Emacs user, otherwise the learning curve will be nearly vertical.

Scotto’s conclusion is that Clojure is the safest first choice, giving you a modern syntax and full-stack environment with access to all the Java libraries, while Common Lisp gives you fast native compilation within a large, stable, and rock-solid ecosystem, and Racket is a good basis for language research.

For my own part I came to Scheme first when I was an undergraduate, then picked up ELisp when I started using Emacs, and then learned Common Lisp when I started wanting to write significant code – and there I’ve stayed with the latter two, quite happily. It’s certainly the case that it’s been easy to move between these dialects, modulo some differences that are purely syntactic. And it’s certainly true that Lisp changed my relationship to code in a deep and persistent way.