Which dialect of Lisp should I learn? [closed]

Answer 1

Also Clojure is a gaining a lot of mindshare these days, and for good reason. Great data structures, profoundly good concurrency support (puts Scheme and CL to shame in this regard), and a great community. It's also relatively simple, CL is as at least as complicated as C++.

This isn't to say I don't enjoy CL or Scheme. I learned Scheme with SICP. And CL brought me to Clojure. It all depends on your goals I suppose. If you want to learn a Lisp that is immensely practical go for Clojure. Otherwise CL or Scheme are both great.

Answer 2

I would say all of them, at least at first. Eventually you will probably develop a preference for Scheme or Common Lisp, but they both have enough differences that it's best to get a handle on everything that's out there.

Scheme has continuations for example, and it's good to learn about those in Scheme, even though they can be implemented in Common Lisp.

Learning the difference between lexical and dynamic scope is important, and if you learn both Common Lisp and elisp you'll come across the implications of both.

Answer 3

Was a kind of "loaded" question to begin with but OP probably didn't know about it. Generally, Common and Scheme lispers are like PC and Apple computer "people", they don't mix. Which one is best is probably not as relevant as which one "works" for you. Really, there is not that much difference. Likely a preference for one over the other maybe influenced by which one you learn first. (To me, an empty list should be "nothing", known in CL as NIL, and that makes me a Common Lisper.) I like the integration of SBCL with Slime using EMACS, but SBCL is not for everyone. For one thing, SBCL is very strict. If you just want to "have fun" the GNU clisp is easy and available for virtually every platform.