prechelt-phone-number-enco VS cl-cookbook

> it’s using Unicode-aware string stuff

Rust uses UTF-8 internally for Strings, so it's very efficient to parse a file into a String, then using slices to go through it... this is probably the best you can get as parsing ASCII input as UTF-8 is very efficient (the 0-bit is always zero in ASCII, the unicode decoder only needs to check that's the case for every byte, so it's not some kind of complicated computation it's doing to decode)...

If you use bytes for everything, you will make the whole code much harder to follow and it still won't run faster.

Check for yourself: https://github.com/renatoathaydes/prechelt-phone-number-enco...

This is a pretty introductory CL article, mostly a commentary on Norvig's solution to the problem. Still, I learned about the #. readmacro from it. The conclusion: "[The Lisp implementation] was the fastest implementation for all input sizes except the largest one, where it performed just slightly worse than my best Java implementation." GH repo at https://github.com/renatoathaydes/prechelt-phone-number-enco.... Sounds like he was mostly measuring the performance of the SBCL bignum implementation.

source: https://github.com/renatoathaydes/prechelt-phone-number-enco...

But after you get past some basic weird stuff, it's a quite wonderful language.

> I can only speak for myself, but I definitely reason about code outside in rather than inside out.

You can indent code to make it much easier to "parse", and use some macros that turn the code inside/out, it's more readable than most other languages.

The CL cookbook is an excellent resource, and this page links to several other excellent resources and books you can read for free online: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/

The "new docs" also present the documentation in a "modern" looking way (rather than the 90's looks of what you get if you Google around): https://lisp-docs.github.io/cl-language-reference/

About other Lisps...

The Racket Guide is definitely not "bone-dry": https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/intro.html

It is well written and looks very beautiful to me.

On another Scheme, I find Guile docs also great: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/index.ht...

They may be a bit more "dry" but they're to the point and very readable! In fact, I think Lisp languages tend to have great documentation.

> the problem with Lisp is that it's sorta bundled with Emacs

What's the problems with Alive, SLT, Slyblime, and Vlime? I mean, I use Emacs, but I was using Emacs before getting into Scheme and CL anyway.

> Every website that teaches Lisp is in ugly HTML+CSS-only style

I dunno, I feel like the Community Spec (<https://cl-community-spec.github.io/pages/index.html>) and the Cookbook (<https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/>) are fine.

> I like the philosophy of (s-exp) but modern lisps have ruined its simplicity for me by introducing additional bracket notations [like this].

Yes, that additional notation is a terrible blight on the perfection that is S-expressions, I wholeheartedly agree.

check out the editor section, there's more than Emacs these days: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...

- https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl for libraries

- https://www.classcentral.com/report/best-lisp-courses/#ancho...

- a recent overview of the ecosystem: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/these-years-in-common-li... (shameless plug, on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321090)

Q4: the Cookbook should get you straight to the point: build a website, web scraper, DB access, reference of data structures… https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/

It's a good book!

Modern companions would be:

- the Cookbook: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ (check out the editors section: Atom/Pulsar, VSCode, Sublime, Jetbrains, Lem...)

- https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl to find libraries

Also:

- https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321090 2022 in review

https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp -- this one is great, and the first thing I recommend

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ -- also great and up to date

https://awesome-cl.com/ -- for anything else.

Little help to boost your videos: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ look at the banner. Cheers.

For more beginner-friendly, I suggest P. Siebels Practical Common Lisp or The CL Cookbook. Both of those should be available in Emacs info format! If authors are lurking in here :-)