Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

September 20, 2018

Learning by Porting (Oldie but Goodie (2008))

Filed under: Clojure,Functional Programming,Lisp — Patrick Durusau @ 11:52 am

PCL -> Clojure by Stuart Halloway.

From the post:

My current leisure-time project is porting the examples from Peter Seibel's excellent Practical Common Lisp (PCL) to Clojure.

I think Clojure is interesting for three reasons:

  1. Clojure is Lisp, but minus historical baggage.
  2. Clojure gives full access to the JVM and Java libraries.
  3. Clojure groks concurrency and state.

My ground rules are simple:

  • I am not going to port everything, just the code samples that interest me as I re-read Practical Common Lisp.
  • Where Peter introduced Common Lisp features in a planned progression, I plan to use whatever Clojure feature come to mind. So I may jump straight into more "advanced" topics, even in the intro chapters.

Please do not assume that this port is a good introduction to Common Lisp! I am cherry-picking examples that are interesting to me from a Clojure perspective. If you want to learn Common Lisp, read PCL. In fact, you should probably read the relevant chapters in PCL first, no matter what.

Halloway credits Ola Bini with the idea for porting examples but the links to Bini’s post aren’t working at the moment.

You know the adage “the best way to learn something is to teach it.” Take this as a variant on that idea.

Porting examples avoids “nodding” understanding (one of my weaknesses). If the ported example doesn’t work, assuming it did in the original, your understanding of the example and/or porting language has failed.

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