Re: Help with Learning Programming and LISP

[Konrad Hinsen]

On 12/09/2019 03:16, Raghav Gururajan wrote:
> I have a doubt though, do I have to learn dialects of LISP in a
> particular order?

No, you can learn each of them on its own, and proceed in any order if 
you want to learn all three of them.

If your main goal is to learn about the core features of the Lisp 
family, I'd start with Scheme, which is the smallest and most coherent 
Lisp dialect. Common Lisp is huge in comparison, but if you try to write 
real-life programs in Scheme, you will discover that there are actually 
good reasons for having a large standardized language. The other main 
difference is that Common Lisp implementations tend to have much better 
development environments and in particular much better debuggers, which 
is also a consequence of the minimalist vs. practical tool approaches 
taken by the two dialects.

In my opinion, there is exactly one reason for learning Emacs Lisp: to 
configure and extend Emacs. Some people also use Emacs Lisp for text 
processing tasks, because Emacs provides an excellent support library 
for that. But as a language, Emacs Lisp is mostly considered outdated 
and inferior to either Scheme or Common Lisp. I would definitely not 
recommend learning Emacs Lisp as a typical modern Lisp.

Konrad.