Working through examples found in various books or online resources. Mostly functional languages, with a heavy bias towards lisps. For something slightly close to reality, see my clojure-playground. For things actually close to reality, I'm afraid all my battle-tested production code that makes money is in private repos!
Download Racket from the official website: https://racket-lang.org
It'll prompt you to drag the Racket folder to the applications folder. Though in my case, it was in some weird non-standard Applications (in /Volumes/Macintosh\ SD/Applications?). DrRacket will be openable as an application, but you'll have to symlink the racket binary yourself if you want it. I did the following:
ln -s /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Applications/Racket\ v7.1/bin/racket /usr/local/bin/racket
You'll notice a few other apps (with corresponding bins):
ls /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Applications/Racket\ v7.1/
DrRacket.app/ Racket Documentation.app/ collects/ include/ share/
PLT Games.app/ Slideshow.app/ doc/ lib/
README.txt bin/ etc/ man
For example, PLT Games comes with a cute old-skool looking set of classic games like minesweeper!
I found this to be the best resource to get a working Common Lisp installed: https://exercism.io/tracks/common-lisp/installation
For posterity, the relevant steps/sections:
brew install sbcl
Official site: https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/#installation
Download quicklisp:
curl -O http://beta.quicklisp.org/quicklisp.lisp
Launch the SBCL REPL in the same dir and then:
* (load "quicklisp.lisp") ;; this will load the downloaded lisp file
* (quicklisp-quickstart:install) ;; this will install quicklisp
* (ql:add-to-init-file) ;; this will add quicklisp setup to your init file (recommended)
That last step is important: you'll have quicklisp loaded every time you launch a new SBCL repl now.
Other okay introductory resources for installation:
- https://lisp-lang.org/learn/getting-started/
- http://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/
I use Emacs for my lisping (and anything really). SLIME is the archetypal interactive mode, and I got it going with:
M-x package-install RET slime RET
From within Emacs itself. And added the following to a file in my emacs config (put it in emacs.d/customizations/setup-common-lisp.el):
(setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/local/bin/sbcl")
(setq slime-contribs '(slime-fancy))
(add-hook 'slime-repl-mode-hook (lambda () (paredit-mode +1)))
From: https://github.com/slime/slime#quick-setup-instructions
More about Slime contrib: https://www.common-lisp.net/project/slime/doc/html/Loading-Contribs.html
With the contribs in place, one can just launch slime with M-x slime and the better REPL (i.e. not the default SBCL * prompt with no autocompletion) should show up.
My current Emacs setup for looks like this:
A very entertaining book that I began reading in 2011 and picked back up in 2018: http://landoflisp.com. Revels in the oddity of Common Lisp and sets out to write a few text-based (and one browser-based) games from scratch, exploring most of the capabilities of the language.
Very opinionated and deeply interesting exploration of Common Lisp macros, interested in macro design for my Clojure explorations. A good chunk of the book is available online, at: https://letoverlambda.com
A gentle introduction to Racket, using graphics libraries bundled with the language and useful for following another introductory book, How to Design Programs, 2nd Edition to build a few games to illustrate concepts such as recursion, structs (mutable and immutable), higher order functions and the for family of macros, lazy evaluation, decision tree exploration and pruning and even networking! Not as ambitious or intense as Land of Lisp, but definitely in the same spirit and conducive to picking up some idiomatic Racket practices laid down by one of the creators of the language.
Finally exploring the other side of the functional house lured by my love of music. This book explores the Euterpea haskell library as well as the language itself. Came out recently (August 2018): http://euterpea.com/haskell-school-of-music/ (the full text of an earlier, incomplete (due to the untimely death of the original author), version is available at: http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/HSoM.pdf)
Ready to get a bit more hands-on experience with Haskell, I shopped around and GPwH seems to be another good "first book" with some practical projects to implement. Definitely less elegant than HSoM, but that does mean it gets to some more practical things faster. Source code for examples and capstone projects is available online (as a zipfile in the manning page). I'm practicing along with the more interesting examples. Same setup as HSoM: install the haskell platform, fire up haskell-mode in emacs, C-c C-l with haskell-interactive-mode enable to compile files and play around in the repl.