You can install any of these with your distribution's package manager, but for this article I use clisp. Popular open source versions include SBCL, GNU Lisp, and GNU Common Lisp (GCL). You might be surprised how much Lisp code there is lurking within big codebases in any given industry, so it's a good idea to have at least a passing familiarity with the language. Whether you love or hate its design philosophies, Lisp is an interesting glimpse at the past and, thanks to Clojure and Guile, into the future. People who love thinking about the aesthetics of programming languages often hate Lisp because of its frequent use of parentheses for scoping in fact, it's a common joke that Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses. People who love thinking about the design of programming languages often love Lisp because of how its syntax and data share the same structure: Lisp code is essentially a list of lists, and its name is an acronym for LISt Processing. eBook: An introduction to programming with Bash.Try for free: Red Hat Learning Subscription.
