You want to look for a balance between simplicity and cleanliness, attractive features, and a platform that will allow you to write interesting and useful software (to yourself) as well as serve as a learning tool. (This last will keep you going and learning for a lot longer.) Here are some possibilities: Scheme. Probably the … Read more
This is a bit of a tricky question, since the differences are both technical and (more importantly, in my opinion) cultural. An answer can only ever provide an imprecise, subjective view. This is what I’m going to provide here. For some raw technical details, see the Scheme Wiki. Scheme is a language built on the … Read more
Yes, web development is one of Common Lisp’s strengths today. As a web server, use Hunchentoot, formerly known as tbnl, by Dr. Edmund Weitz. You can run it as a back-end to Apache using mod_proxy as a reverse proxy, or as a stand-alone server. Various HTML generation solutions are available, from PHP-style templates to Lisp … Read more
Lisp is good because it has a very minimal, simple, regular syntax. Lisp is bad because it has a very minimal, simple, regular syntax.
Short answer Bypass the default evaluation rules and do not evaluate the expression (symbol or s-exp), passing it along to the function exactly as typed. Long Answer: The Default Evaluation Rule When a regular (I’ll come to that later) function is invoked, all arguments passed to it are evaluated. This means you can write this: … Read more
Here’s the Clojure documentation for Keywords and Symbols. Keywords are symbolic identifiers that evaluate to themselves. They provide very fast equality tests… Symbols are identifiers that are normally used to refer to something else. They can be used in program forms to refer to function parameters, let bindings, class names and global vars… Keywords are … Read more
Try reading Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel.
Lisp WAS used in AI until the end of the 1980s. In the 80s, though, Common Lisp was oversold to the business world as the “AI language”; the backlash forced most AI programmers to C++ for a few years. These days, prototypes usually are written in a younger dynamic language (Perl, Python, Ruby, etc) and … Read more