Simon Dobson (Posts about tutorial)

Lisp as a second language

Simon Dobson — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 15:01:40 GMT

Lisp as a second language

Peter Desain. Lisp as a Second Language: Functional Aspects. Perspectives on New Music 20, pp.192–222. 1990.

In some ways this article should come under "applications", as it's mainly concerned with using Lisp to represent and manipulate music. Indeed, it presents a system that can be used to perform all sorts of common transformations of the tones and timing of a piece. It's easy to see how the resulting system could be used to compose and then to drive instruments, for example through a MIDI interface.

The music perspective is however secondary to the goal of teaching and showcasing Lisp through the medium of a realistic example of symbolic programming. It covers a lot of ground, starting with lists and functions and including first-class functions and combinators as means of implementing the musical structures. It's a great piece of pedagogy that treats the application and the language as closely linked, and not shying-away from some quite advanced techniques that have clear applications in the domain. It would be great to see this used as a basis for actual musical composition and performance.

Casting SPELs in Lisp

Simon Dobson — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 10:25:53 GMT

Casting SPELs in Lisp

https://www.lisperati.com/casting.html

A tongue-in-cheek – but still excellent – comicbook-style introduction to Lisp programming. (There's also a version specifically for Emacs Lisp.) It's structured around building an adventure-style game, which as well as being a classic also offers lots of opportunities for exploring different data structures and algorithms: one can easily imagine expanding it to include (for example) an AI second player or autonomous non-player characters and gradually building a really complicated application from a standing start.

A road to Common Lisp

Simon Dobson — Mon, 27 May 2024 16:00:55 GMT

A road to Common Lisp

A Road to Common Lisp

This a really brief, yet really interesting, approach to introducing Lisp to someone. Interesting because it covers all the usual ground, but also has copious pointers to other material slightly-beyond-introductory ("Where to go from here"). It also links to material that's essential to modern practice, such as Lisp packages and systems, and the essential "standard libraries" such as Alexandria, Bordeaux, CL-PPCRE, usocket, and the like: the things that are needed in practice and which in other languages would probably be built-in and included directly in an introduction.

LISPcraft

Simon Dobson — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 12:23:08 GMT

LISPcraft

Robert Wilensky. LISPcraft. W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-95442-0. 1984.

Hard to know whether to include this as an introduction or collection of applications, since it runs all the way from basic uses to pattern-matching and associative retrieval, by way of the non-list data types in Lisp, and includes discussion of the symbol table and other internals that definitely fall into the "advanced" category.

However, this was my second introduction to Lisp (after SICP), so it has a fond place in my memory. The fact that it deals with language internals isn't a bad thing, because it deals with the basics so well. It's very much a traditional programming introduction focusing on the "needed" parts of the language. It pre-dates the Common Lisp standard and doesn't touch on CLOS, which perhaps make it a less appropriate choice for newcomers these days than Practical Common Lisp.

There is also a second edition. I haven't read it, but it seems that it addresses at least the concern about being non-standard:

Robert Wilensky. Common LISPcraft. W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-039395544-6. 1986.

Learn Common Lisp in Y minutes

Simon Dobson — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 14:14:35 GMT

Learn Common Lisp in Y minutes

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/common-lisp/

A one-web-page introduction to Common Lisp covering pretty much all the language in enough detail to at least start writing simple command-line programs (and understanding those of others). Includes macros and CLOS. Quite an achievement to make it all so readable.

Practical Common Lisp

Simon Dobson — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 13:15:30 GMT

Practical Common Lisp

Peter Seibel. Practical Common Lisp. Apress. ISBN 978-1-4302-0017-8. 2005.

The classic, very thorough and hands-on tutorial introduction that doesn't skip the hard parts like the condition system and non-local blocks and exists (and the relationship between the two). It's also got good chapters on CLOS.

The text is complemented by a set of modern examples, for web services, database, and binary file parsers: quite a long way removed from the examples in many introductory texts. It doesn't make much use of macro programming in these examples, which is a shame, so follow with On Lisp or Let over Lambda once the structure of the language is clear.