You correctly advised people to use great books like Practical Common LISP to learn the gotchas of that. Another I saw in Barnes and Noble that looked fun was Land of LISP. I just skimmed it so can’t say how good it is past fun examples can keep people motivated to learn.
When you brought up Scheme and Racket, you didn’t mention the de facto book How to Design Programs that most Racket users tell me they learned from. It gets mentioned in about every discussion on Scheme or Racket plus many on programming in general. Did you try going through that book with Racket and still had the problems you mentioned? If not, maybe try HtDP. If so, maybe mention it anyway since it does help a lot of people learn Scheme. The combo of that plus your own experiences would then let people know they might have better luck with Common LISP if Scheme doesn’t work out.
I’m not the author of the blog posting. Just thought it would be of interest here.
In fact I agree with your comments on the article. As it happens I teach the students at my university Racket as their first language. A large part of the course is based on HtDP.
You correctly advised people to use great books like Practical Common LISP to learn the gotchas of that. Another I saw in Barnes and Noble that looked fun was Land of LISP. I just skimmed it so can’t say how good it is past fun examples can keep people motivated to learn.
When you brought up Scheme and Racket, you didn’t mention the de facto book How to Design Programs that most Racket users tell me they learned from. It gets mentioned in about every discussion on Scheme or Racket plus many on programming in general. Did you try going through that book with Racket and still had the problems you mentioned? If not, maybe try HtDP. If so, maybe mention it anyway since it does help a lot of people learn Scheme. The combo of that plus your own experiences would then let people know they might have better luck with Common LISP if Scheme doesn’t work out.
And welcome to Lobsters! Hope you enjoy it. :)
The author is, unfortunately, right that backtraces in Racket are mostly useless. This is something that I put up with, but also struggle with.
Thanks @nickpsecurity
I’m not the author of the blog posting. Just thought it would be of interest here.
In fact I agree with your comments on the article. As it happens I teach the students at my university Racket as their first language. A large part of the course is based on HtDP.
Oops. I looked at it wrong. Good you are already on top of the HtDP thing. :)