Lisp Community - Quality tutorials/resources [closed]

Question

As many other people interested in learning Lisp, I feel the resources available are not the best for beginners and eventually prevent many new people from learning it. Do you feel it could be created some sort of community, with a website, forum or something, that provides good (as in quality) resources/tutorials, for Lisp users, possibly translated to several idioms? That way beginners that don't have the necessary skills for writing tutorials could help translating them. Is it a bad idea or is it something that could be accomplished? Give me some feedback or flame me :D

Answer 1

There are two popular dialects of Lisp - Common Lisp and Scheme. Both have excellent books/tutorials and implementations available online for free. Beginners can start with Scheme which is simpler. Some resources for learning Scheme:

Free Books:

1. Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum days. (pdf)
2. The Scheme Programming Language.
3. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
4. How To Design Programs

Online communities/resources:

1. The latest Scheme standard.
2. Scheme Cookbook.
3. Scheme Requests for Implementation
4. Scheme Related Research
5. http://www.schemers.org/
6. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/scheme/

A Scheme implementation suitable for beginners is PLT Scheme.

Free Books to learn Common Lisp:

1. Practical Common Lisp
2. On Lisp
3. Common Lisp HyperSpec (Reference)
4. Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation

Online communities/resources for Common Lisp:

1. The Common Lisp Cookbook
2. http://common-lisp.net/
3. CLiki
4. The Common Lisp Directory

Popular Common Lisp implementations: SBCL, CLISP, Clozure CL, Allegro CL

Answer 2

Lisp has been around for a long time, there are many (fragmented) communities. There's really no way to "create" a common community, especially from the outside.

Paul Graham would be a likely (IMNO, N=naive) person to potentially unite a large lisp community, given his popularity among younger programmers, as well as his background in lisp (writing On Lisp). However, he has chosen to create a yet another dialect of lisp, Arc.

Many folks have written about the fragmentation of the Lisp community, or Lisp's inability to "catch on". Some examples: here, here, here, and here. So, while your idea is a good one, it is probably fruitless.

That being said, don't let me stop you from rising up and being such a uniting figure in the Lisp community.

As far as existing tutorials, the Emacs Wiki is a good starting place for learning Emacs Lisp. And for an introduction to Scheme - as well as a good introduction to programming in general, there's the classic Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

I find those two resources to be good starting points for learning Emacs Lisp and Scheme. I haven't played with Arc, but presumably there would be some good tutorials on learning Arc - because it is designed in part to be a good language for creating basic web apps.