3 ms·

First and foremost it's critically important to be aware of the mistakes in the book. Notable are the following: You should really use DEFVAR to introduce var

First and foremost it's critically important to be aware of the mistakes in the book. Notable are the following: You should really use DEFVAR to introduce variables, not SETF as graham does. SETF sets to _places_, and when you use it on undefined variables, the outcome is undefined, but normally a lexical binding is created. I don't know exactly why the book does this. CLOS is better covered by Sonya Keene's book and Art of the MOP. Honestly, ANSI CL isn't quite as nice as PCL, but my opinion is that they're both too brief an entry to Lisp, especially for people new to functional programming and Lisp. "A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" would probably be a better start point for CL, as would those Little Schemer books would be for Scheme.

pg 18y ago
Actually I'd argue that the most important thing is to understand the big ideas, not minutae of "correct" usage.
jrockway 18y ago
Honestly, ANSI CL isn't quite as nice as PCL, but my opinion is that they're both too brief an entry to Lisp, especially for people new to functional programming and Lisp. "A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" would probably be a better start point for CL, as would those Little Schemer books would be for Scheme. I disagree. PCL could have been condensed down to a few presentation slides. It takes a long time to not say much.
- gruseom 18y ago
  PCL could have been condensed down to a few presentation slides Well, that's a little unfair. It couldn't be condensed to a few slides for people who don't know Lisp. Which is its target audience, after all. I do agree that PCL isn't as concise as ACL. But we'd know that from the limit theorem on Paul Graham's writing anyway :)
gruseom 18y ago
ANSI CL isn't quite as nice as PCL, but my opinion is that they're both too brief an entry to Lisp I have to disagree. Those are the two books I learned Lisp from and I didn't find them too brief at all. I like both books a lot. In some ways they're polar opposites, and I've noticed people tend to prefer the one they're more temperamentally compatible with. ACL has a classical style, precise and formal. PCL is more exploratory and dabbly. If you're the kind of person who wants concepts 1..n to be defined before n+1 is introduced, that's ACL. If you want to see cool examples before grokking all the details, that's PCL. PCL's temperament seems more common than ACL's, as far as I can tell.

pg 18y ago

Actually I'd argue that the most important thing is to understand the big ideas, not minutae of "correct" usage.

jrockway 18y ago

Honestly, ANSI CL isn't quite as nice as PCL, but my opinion is that they're both too brief an entry to Lisp, especially for people new to functional programming and Lisp. "A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" would probably be a better start point for CL, as would those Little Schemer books would be for Scheme. I disagree. PCL could have been condensed down to a few presentation slides. It takes a long time to not say much.

gruseom 18y ago
PCL could have been condensed down to a few presentation slides Well, that's a little unfair. It couldn't be condensed to a few slides for people who don't know Lisp. Which is its target audience, after all. I do agree that PCL isn't as concise as ACL. But we'd know that from the limit theorem on Paul Graham's writing anyway :)

gruseom 18y ago

ANSI CL isn't quite as nice as PCL, but my opinion is that they're both too brief an entry to Lisp I have to disagree. Those are the two books I learned Lisp from and I didn't find them too brief at all. I like both books a lot. In some ways they're polar opposites, and I've noticed people tend to prefer the one they're more temperamentally compatible with. ACL has a classical style, precise and formal. PCL is more exploratory and dabbly. If you're the kind of person who wants concepts 1..n to be defined before n+1 is introduced, that's ACL. If you want to see cool examples before grokking all the details, that's PCL. PCL's temperament seems more common than ACL's, as far as I can tell.