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Arc for non programmers
4 points by pqs 5920 days ago | 9 comments
I'm not a programmer, but I write scripts in bash, R, PV-Wave for my PhD. I'd like to have fun writing code and I think that lisp might be the way to do something interesting. After what I've seen, Arc is made for exploring, which is just what I want to do. How should I learn Arc? Should I first learn Scheme and then Arc? Which way should I go? With which books? Which blogs? ... Thanks! :-)


6 points by pg 5920 days ago | link

You don't need to learn Scheme first. You should be able to pick up Arc as easily as any other Lisp dialect. The downside is that Arc is a very new language, which means there's not much written about it. However, the Arc community (such as it is so far) seems pretty friendly, so people here will probably help you out if you have questions.

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4 points by kennytilton 5920 days ago | link

I would recommend getting a Common Lisp (nice free trial versions available from commercial vendors) and PG's ANSI Common Lisp book, second choice Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. Ignore things in CL you do not see in Arc <g>. But the core ideas documented in solid CL references will help directly with Arc.

Scheme is a second choice, but if you catch fire and want to start programming in anger with some Lisp I think CL gets the edge. Just my opinion, of course.

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3 points by gregwebs 5920 days ago | link

Using an unstable language may not be a good idea for you. You might be better off learning a different lisp like scheme or newLisp. But you should probably state what you want to do- you said you want to explore, but what are you exploring?. Do you want to write scripts in lisp instead of bash? Are you trying to write a specific kind of program?

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2 points by Zak 5920 days ago | link

I have to recommend avoiding newLisp; it's actually a very old-fashioned Lisp and most likely an evolutionary dead-end. Clojure is another new Lisp dialect that seems like it's worth a look. It runs on the JVM, which could be a big win in the short-term.

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1 point by pqs 5919 days ago | link

First I just want to play. With what I would play? Yes, do what I do in bash would be a good idea. I'd also like to program things for my website. I have ideas of how some things should be on the web but I cannot implement them.

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4 points by godtvisken 5920 days ago | link

There is a book called "The Little Schemer" which is a very neat introduction to Scheme (specifically about the important paradigm of recursion).

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2 points by lg 5920 days ago | link

agreed, the little schemer is an awesome book, nothing about lisp made sense to me until i worked through it. Afterwards, pg's book just felt like a bunch of useful information, not a conceptual overload.

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1 point by dyoo 5915 days ago | link

You may want to take a serious look at: "How to Design Programs":

    http://htdp.org/
It provides explicit support and scaffolds for learning how to program using the DrScheme IDE. (Coincidently, the underlying engine behind DrScheme is the same technology that's powering the prototype arc0 compiler.)

DrScheme supports multiple "teaching" languages with slightly less power than full-on Scheme. This sounds weird at first, but the purpose about using a more limited language is to provide excellent error messages while you're learning. i.e. if you're just beginning to learn how to write functions, then passing around functions as first-class arguments may not be what you intend. So the system, in Beginner level, will treat this as a syntax error with a good explanation of what's going on.

Once you have a good enough understanding of programming, you can graduate to the full "Pretty Big" language, or go into arc or whatever you want.

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2 points by pqs 5920 days ago | link

I forgot to tell that there is this guide http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt But maybe there is something better.

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