The Little Schemer

What Hacker News says

1. TimorousBestieAug 2026
   Instead of spending time beating one’s head against Russell and Whitehead, I would advise reading Homotopy Type Theory (aka the HoTT Book). Dependent types are cool and mind-expanding, but higher inductive types are downright mind-altering.

   The Little Schemer/Typer could be used as a preparatory text to gear one up for HoTT.

   It also has the advantage of being a bit more applicable to functional programming languages, maybe even more so than Mac Lane’s Categories for the Working Mathematician (which I sometimes see suggested to mathematically-inclined Haskell novices).

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2. nobleachAug 2026
   CL was recommended to me here. I had only played with Scheme over the years (SICP and Little Schemer - which, I used to recommend to every engineer that answered to me). I quickly bought Practical Common Lisp in hardcover (used). The language has a LOT to love. But it's caused me to go back and revisit Scheme(s). I put down my CL book to look at The Scheme Programming language and Chez Scheme. Going through all of this without an LLM has restored some joy. But I can understand reluctance to use this unless I could assemble a team with a ton of knowledge. Prompting for Lisp sounds like fun. But not having the deep understanding means I'd be blindly accepting its suggestions. I can't say what Lisp would be better. Clojure maybe?
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3. zelphirkaltJul 2026
   To see really elegant and great code, I recommend looking in books. I have seen elegant code in: SICP, The Little Schemer, Software Design for Flexibility.
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4. VohlenzerJul 2026
   I finished Let Over Lambda recently. I'm not an experienced lisp programmer but it's strangely readable if you allow yourself to not understand every little detail of the Common Lisp code. For example I hadn't read On Lisp. I had read The Little Schemer.

   It's a wonderful tour of advanced macro concepts. With several of the macros presented I found myself saying "well that's just x language feature in y" but that's missing the point. The point is that Common Lisp allows you to implement your own language features, with macros of course!

   This chapter is a wonderful climax to the whole book. Lisp moving Forth moving Lisp reminded me of the intertwined nature of DNA, RNA and proteins in Biology.

   There's great humour throughout the book, I especially enjoyed the little sideways jabs at Scheme programmers!

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5. isityettimeMay 2026
   Racket is a variety of Scheme that grew up as a teaching language, but now also has a few other notable niches as well.

   Typed Racket is to Racket as TypeScript is to JavaScript: it adds some additional static checks to an otherwise dynamic language via gradual typing. This pair of languages might help begin answer the question "does gradual typing generally help LLMs, or does TypeScript outperform JavaScript for incidental reasons?".

   Among Lisps, I'm most interested in seeing Clojure because it's a language I can see myself using with LLMs at work. But Typed Racket and Racket could make an especially interesting pair because of the gradual typing thing.

   I'm not sure whether you want to include them in your project. The kind of selectivity you describe yourself as going for is hard for me, especially since I'm not the one doing the work. :)

   PS: Aside from this benchmarking and comparison project: Racket is an interesting language and seems like a good place to start if you want to explore classic Scheme texts (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, The Little Schemer, How to Design Programs) or newer ones that try to teach newer or more specialized ideas (e.g., The Little Typer). You may have to tweak the language a bit to stay faithful to some of those books, but that's something Racket is good at and there are already sources noting relevant differences online.

   When a non-programmer in my life expressed curiosity about programming, we ended up starting HtDP together and it's been fun. I think Racket was a good choice for that.

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6. iainctduncanMay 2026
   Strange that the post makes no mention of the Little Schemer series, because teaching you to "think Scheme" is exactly what those books do. Some people are put off by the weird style (combination of children's book visuals and socratic logic problem presentation), but they work!
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