Ansi Common Lisp by Paul Graham is a good book. I think it might be out of print, so your best bet to get it via Amazon. I got the book for a "Natural Language Processing" class I took my sophomore year in college. We had to write the programing projects in LISP, and so I needed to learn Lisp quickly. The book helped me quite a bit.
I don't know enough Lisp to say whether it's good or bad. It seems like everyone who has used Lisp loves it, yet the most popular languages these days are descended from C. So what is it about Lis...
I really feel that I should learn Lisp and there are plenty of good resources out there to help me do it. I'm not put off by the complicated syntax, but where in "traditional commercial programming"
Lisp is used in many applications, but mostly not the way CS students learn it. They use Lisp for basic CS concepts. Real Lisp software often looks different. More macros, more object-oriented, more imperative, lots of low-level stuff, ...
Lisp symbols can double both as their values, and markers where you in other languages would have used strings, such as keys to hash tables. This is where quote comes in. Say you want to plot resource allocations from a Python application, but rather do the plotting in Lisp. Have your Python app do something like this:
Often Lisp users develop embedded languages and to make that a bit easier, the Common Lisp standard tries to keep character usage down to a minimum and also provides the mechanism of macro characters and dispatch macro characters.
The general Lisp idea is the same for Common Lisp or Scheme or Emacs Lisp or Clojure, but the specifics will be different - so keep that in mind if reading Graham's book, which focuses mostly on Common Lisp (with some mentions of Scheme specifics.)
If SET and SETQ are to be booted from a Common Lisp successor, they will have to get some replacement. Their use in high-level code is limited, but low-level code (for example, the code SETF is implemented in) needs them.
I have tried to understand the difference between Lisp-1 and Lisp-2 and how this relates to Clojure but I still do not understand properly. Can anyone enlighten me?
Common Lisp was never intended to be the AI language, it was created to be used in the industry. For research, Scheme is usually used. And never, ever judge a language by its age - it just isn't proportional to coolness, and vice versa. C is old but cool, so why does Lisp's age matter?
