[rescue] fans fans fans...

[Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 01:51:44PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On June 21, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> [large list of lisp stuff deleted for brevity]
> > I could go on...
> 
>   ...and you may name a hundred systems.  Maybe even five hundred.
> Compare that to the number of packages written in, say,
> C...FORTRAN...C++...hmm? ;)  *poke*
> 
>   [I just love yanking Josh's chain!]
> 
>   So you STILL haven't pointed me in the right direction for getting a
> quick intro to this too-many-parens-for-normal-people language.  What
> environment should I download?  What platform should I build it on?
> Are there any *PRACTICAL* introductory texts, either printed on
> online, that I should read?  Bearing in mind that I've always been a
> procedural programmer..

There are versions of scheme or lisp that run under Java.  You can
call back and forth between a scheme function and a java function,
etc.  Since you are doing a lot with Java, this might make the most
sense for you.  Though be warned, the implementations are not
super-fast in such cases.

I would be happy to chime in, but I haven't found much worth reading
concerning Lisp/Scheme either.  You might want to look at Paul
Graham's book, I found "On Lisp" to be quite readable, and it did not
have purely academic examples either.  BTW Graham and another guy
programmed the code that later became Yahoo! Stores.

./patrick