Learning Lisp

A couple of months ago I put together an entry for Google’s Android competition with a few friends and I just found out today that we were one of the 50 teams that won the first round. There’s a second round competition just for these top 50 teams now which runs till the end of June. So Lisp related activities are going to be on pause mostly till then. =)

Here’s a pretty interesting example of a piece of software that was developed using Lisp:
Tiburon LinkEXPLORER Helps Snare Prison Drugs Supply

The more I delve into Lisp, the more I am convinced that it is going to become increasingly useful in the web of the future. Amongst other things, Lisp is supposed to be useful for complex systems with problems that have unclear and changing parameters with multiple types and sources of data and plenty of errors. That also happens to precisely describe the systems that are emerging on the net today! Maybe Lisp, like Ruby and Python today, might find itself in the center of the next wave?

I’ve been using CLISP directly from the commandline via cygwin on Windows to play around with the language, but I’ve now switched to using Lispbox which is basically EMACS configured for Lisp. I’m using the Allegro version as it comes with Allegroserve that I hope will allow me to easily play around with web apps at some point.

http://gigamonkeys.com/lispbox/

It seems like there are only two books on Lisp in recent memory that are worth talking about. One is by Paul Graham himself, and the other, which I just placed an order for, is Peter Siebel’s “Practical Common Lisp”. You can peruse the online version of the book here: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/

Almost 3 years after the last time I had a blog to dheo.com, welcome again!

I first read about Lisp almost 10 years ago when teaching myself Java. Like most literature that I’ve encountered since, the author briefly mentioned Lisp as one of the earliest programming languages that was still popular with the artificial intelligence community. I didn’t may a lot more attention to it.

It wasn’t until very recently that I started hearing more about Lisp in the web development world that I live in, probably mostly due to Paul Graham (see the Beating the Averages link on the right) and a few recent companies like ITA software. I spent some time learning about the general outlines of the language and it definitely looks like an interesting project. It seems that the mindset one needs for solving problems with Lisp is quite different than the usual mindset that one uses with more typical web development languages. At the very least, I hope I get some perspective on how to solve problems differently.

My goal is to eventually develop a fairly involved web application that is powered by Lisp at the back. I am keeping this blog in the hopes of initially documenting my learning and eventually turning this place into a resource for Lisp based web development.