Okay, I get it. Lisp is great.
Where should I start? It wasn't like I was planning on doing anything else at work next week...
In no time you'll be putting up "my other car is a cdr" bumper stickers!
Yeah but then learning Lisp is going to get in the way of welding up new bumper brackets, and the bumper will still be lying in the pile of things beside the shed waiting to be reattached... ;-)
Install Clojure. Read https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started and choose an editor. If you don't have a favorite editor, I recommend NeoVim with the LazyVim package (clone https://github.com/LazyVim/starter and follow instructions), then run the :LazyExtras command and install the Clojure package. If you haven't used LazyVim before, https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ is a good book; you can read it online for free, then if you find it useful, purchase a copy to reward the author for his hard work.
Once you've installed an editor, you'll want to install https://leiningen.org/ which is the de facto (if not de jure) package manager for Clojure. Makes compiling your Clojure code to an .exe (for distribution to other machines where Clojure isn't installed) about as simple as it can be.
Once you've got an editor and a package manager installed, you're ready to read https://clojure.org/guides/learn/clojure as well as the various books on Lisp others are recommending. Depending on which book it is, the functions may have different names (e.g., some languages use `first` and `rest` while others stick with the historical `car` and `cdr` names, but they're the same functions), but you should find that the concepts translate perfectly well from one dialect of Lisp to another and the only challenge is having to look up what name the function has in the dialect you're using.
Emacs does have one advantage over Vim when it comes to Lisp, though, which is that it almost certainly comes with Lisp-related keybindings already ready to go. And also that its config files are written in Lisp, so if you're using Emacs then you're already reading and writing Lisp code just to configure it. Two. Two advantages. Oh, and fanatical devotion to the Pope ^W^W Richard Stallman. Three advantages... I'll come in again.
(The professor I had for that AI course in Grad School didn't know Lisp and wanted to learn it better, especially because so much of the textbook was in it, so asked us for volunteers to learn it as well and I took that as an excuse/challenge to do every project with a language choice that semester in Common Lisp.)
This is the version i read:
https://www.abebooks.com/9780023397639/Little-LISPer-Third-E...
f(x)
(f x)
["f", "x"]
(print (< 10 20))
["print", ["<", 10, 20]]
code = ["print", ["<", 10, 20]]
def eval(code):
# magic
eval(code) # True
These articles are very good and accessible: