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Any Lisp book that is written today owes it to the Lisp community and the rest of the world to write in a modern, safe, and digestible style. One issue with man

Any Lisp book that is written today owes it to the Lisp community and the rest of the world to write in a modern, safe, and digestible style. One issue with many Lisp books, especially older and self-published ones, is that they contain the author’s pet style or pet idioms, and they wouldn’t fly in a team environment. I think this is especially important because Lisp books are for learning, and if it’s just that much more difficult to Google(/ddg/AltaVista), it will be a frustrating disservice. Common Lisp has extremely reasonable and regular syntax if you stick to some basic rules and you don’t “flex” the language gratuitously. Written in such a way, the structure would be familiar to the modern Python or Java programmer. Yet the language is a workhorse when the problems get tough or gnarly. Looking forward to the publication of this book. Seeing introductory algorithms in modern Common Lisp would be a great resource.

vseloved 7y ago
Thanks for the comment. The style issue will be addressed in the next chapter that is entitled "Crash-Course into Lisp"
dtornabene 7y ago
Going to push back on this. Lisp is written to be "flexed". And people can and should write it however they want. I think treating students like they're all incapable of googling is utterly infantilizing and nothing about it serves any purpose other than stroking the authors ego. The vast, and I mean seriously vast, majority of programming books waste pages and often multiple whole chapters on treating the user like they can't find the documentation, like they can't reason about different syntactical constructions, and it leaves the learner hobbled and weakened when going out into the real world and trying to read, let alone write, actually code to accomplish a real task. People can cry about Paul Grahams style in ANSI lisp, or Let over Lambda, anyone who can work through either of those books is going to be fine reading Practical Common Lisp (or whatever). Also, finally, Common Lisp isn't exactly known for being a "team language" and the overwhelming majority of projects that I know of were originated by one person. I for one hope the author contributes his work in whatever way will he feels like. Lisp is a liberating language to use, we should write about it in the same way

vseloved 7y ago

Thanks for the comment. The style issue will be addressed in the next chapter that is entitled "Crash-Course into Lisp"

dtornabene 7y ago

Going to push back on this. Lisp is written to be "flexed". And people can and should write it however they want. I think treating students like they're all incapable of googling is utterly infantilizing and nothing about it serves any purpose other than stroking the authors ego. The vast, and I mean seriously vast, majority of programming books waste pages and often multiple whole chapters on treating the user like they can't find the documentation, like they can't reason about different syntactical constructions, and it leaves the learner hobbled and weakened when going out into the real world and trying to read, let alone write, actually code to accomplish a real task. People can cry about Paul Grahams style in ANSI lisp, or Let over Lambda, anyone who can work through either of those books is going to be fine reading Practical Common Lisp (or whatever). Also, finally, Common Lisp isn't exactly known for being a "team language" and the overwhelming majority of projects that I know of were originated by one person. I for one hope the author contributes his work in whatever way will he feels like. Lisp is a liberating language to use, we should write about it in the same way