5 ms·

Mark Watson's Lisp books

235 points by KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago

blueberry87 3y ago
+1 for "Brady_story".
- harry8 3y ago
  what score change +/- should there be for bragging about having "... 55 US patents"?
  - mindcrime 3y ago
    And also a fairly active HN user as well! https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mark_l_watson https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mark_l_watson
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - davidrupp 3y ago
    "Bragging" seems unnecessarily pejorative. Reading the information about his patents didn't sway me one way or the other the first time I visited his site, but I can see it being relevant data for some of his audience. The (superior) content of his books did sway me, as did Mark's willingness to make many of them available for free. I've since had occasion to interact personally with Mark, and I've unfailingly found him to be gracious and personable; "braggart" does not apply, in my experience.
  - myth_drannon 3y ago
    It's just a basic resume credentials, the same as job experience. There is another HN thread talking having personal projects online. Whatever increases your changes to put the leg in the door, do it.
lettergram 3y ago
Having worked with Mark for a couple of years (he was my manager), I got to hear many stories. One of the more interesting was when he got special permission from his employer at the time to purchase / access a lisp machine. Wealth of knowledge, good programmer, definitely worth reading his books (if interested in a topic he covers)
- emmelaich 3y ago
  Nice, what was the year? Approximately.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  More importantly, he’s a GOFAI engineer who understands modern ML. Folks like him are rare (especially those of his generation who are still actively coding).
  - tromp 3y ago
    Had to look that up: "Good old fashioned artificial intelligence"
    - freilanzer 3y ago
      I always read it as "gang of four ai" first.
    - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
      GOFAI is basically "artificial intelligence" algorithms that don't involve neural networks or statistical learning. Deep Blue and Prolog (knowledge bases aka "expert systems") are your typical examples. They usually involve sophisticated tree construction and hand coded search algorithms. Modern ML also has tree stuff and symbolic algorithms but they are all heavily augmented by deep learning and probabilistic methods like Monte Carlo. When people say Lisp was used for "AI research" and that it suffered from the "AI winter", GOFAI is what they are referring to. Neural networks exist back then but they were very small scale, good enough for some signal processing applications and as research curiosities but most of the powerful emergent capabilities were never truly realized until post millenium.
behnamoh 3y ago
The historical hype around Lisp is from back when the alternative was C. https://manifold.markets/Alana/convince-me-will-i-learn-lisp-in-20#g3OvGgqVhOBjyNwDMx4C https://manifold.markets/Alana/convince-me-will-i-learn-lisp...
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  Haha, no. Modern PLs have reached parity with Lisps but comparing C and Lisp is apples and oranges. C was fast no doubt but much lower level than LISP and served a different purpose. And then you proceed to link someone’s comment as a reference? Nobody is trying to convince you to use Lisp, it’s just free books you could learn from if interested. The hostility is hard to understand.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    Their point was that the "superpowers" and mythology of Lisp come from a time (the 80s) in which C was the primary alternative, popular language. Standard ML came later and the further MLs in OCaml and F# came much, much later. Erlang was proprietary. Prolog was around but misunderstood and remains so. Smalltalk was there and super powerful (maybe moreso?), but as far as I understand, kept to certain machines. But now we have Elixir, Erlang, F#, OCaml, Scala, Racket, Chez Scheme, Gerbil Scheme, Chicken Scheme, Ruby, Python, Clojure, Pharo, etc. all competing with the standardized Lisp in Common Lisp. I love Lisp, or rather Scheme and its ilk, but the point is that its mythology comes from the 80s and early 90s in which it did sort of set the standard for modern languages. It's really a fantastic family of languages, but there doesn't seem to be one that really stands out as pragmatic, industrial alternatives to the other languages it has heavily inspired. It seems Clojure and Racket come close, and Common Lisp is just too "hardcore" for pragmatic use, in my opinion.
    - fuzztester 3y ago
      >Common Lisp is just too "hardcore" for pragmatic use, in my opinion. In what ways? Asking as Lisp newbie.
JaDogg 3y ago
Lisp is cool. It has that hacker feeling when you code in it. No matter the dialect :) Downloaded the whole repo, will have a look.
- arookery 3y ago
  Lisp is the way
- bitwize 3y ago
  Lisp has that cool hacker feeling because it's how software development should be done: a relatively minimal core of concepts exploding into endless possibilities, the code you write itself expressed in terms of a runtime data structure which can be traversed and manipulated, the immediacy of a REPL and directly changing a live system. It never took off because developers are modern Sisyphi, who when freed of their burdens immediately yearn for the feel and heft of the cold stone boulder in their hands. That's how we got Java: enough of Lisp to be tolerable and familiar to C++ programmers.
  - epolanski 3y ago
    If lisps are that good why there's so little killer software written in it? With rare exceptions like emacs and clojure's datomic I feel like such a lauded language should have more to show. And yet, there's comparatively much more killer applications written in php alone than all lisps combined. I am proficient in several lisps by the way (Racket, CL, Emacs Lisp, Scheme) and honestly every time I need to start a "serious" project I just feel like any other language depending on the use case is a better fit.
    - JaDogg 3y ago
      Popularity does not mean good. Also I assume most killer apps use right tool for the job - For example in a corporate setting with multiple developers something like Java would be better. I speculate the following - if there are few developers who love lisp, then all can try to mob program a lisp code base -- multiple cursors, same time (code review and development all happen parallel). (Not sure if such an editor exists) This would be a good way to maintain a lisp code base I think (speculation). (Compared to Java where you can work mostly alone and make a mess and it will still work somewhat OK)
chii 3y ago
I wish github just linked pdfs to the google viewer, so that it could be read without having to download the file to disk! for example: https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fmark-watson%2Ffree-older-books-and-software%2Fmain%2Fopencontent%2Fclojureai.pdf https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fra... I guess its possible to make a bookmarklet for it...
- JBiserkov 3y ago
  I clicked the first one, it's readable in the browser for me? https://github.com/mark-watson/free-older-books-and-software/blob/main/opencontent/AIprog.pdf https://github.com/mark-watson/free-older-books-and-software...
- qwerty456127 3y ago
  Can't you change this in your browser config? I remember changing this back and forth a number of times during my life, depending on what was more convenient for me given the nature of the jobs I was predominantly doing during those days. Nowadays I would prefer PDFs (notably including those served as data URIs) to be automatically cached to a dedicated directory and opened in an external PDF reader but I had no time to configure this so far.
jacquesm 3y ago
Mark is right here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mark_l_watson https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mark_l_watson
- distcs 3y ago
  I have learnt a great deal about modern state of Lisp from comments written by Mark and others like pjmlp on HN. By reading their comments I've learnt that Lisp is relevant in non-Lisp languages too. So many programming languages borrow concepts that were explored in Lisp languages. And not just Lisp. ML too. Their comments helped me learn this kind of background. If I could get a directory of active Lisp devs who comment on HN that would be great! Maybe even create a feed out of their comments. Is there any feed of any kind on HN? Even a basic RSS feed could be useful. I could pull the whole feed and filter them out for their comments.
  - nuclearnice1 3y ago
    You may enjoy this old book. http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html
gooseus 3y ago
Title isn't accurate, this seems to be a link to all of Mark Watson's older books: including books on Lisp, Haskell, Java, and personal stories. Looks like this PR from a couple months ago was him moving a bunch of older books from his personal website into this repo: https://github.com/mark-watson/free-older-books-and-software/commit/5011bcfce3bda68c53b2162c7b1ed77158f0f4fb https://github.com/mark-watson/free-older-books-and-software...

235 points by KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago

blueberry87 3y ago

+1 for "Brady_story".

harry8 3y ago
what score change +/- should there be for bragging about having "... 55 US patents"?
- mindcrime 3y ago
  And also a fairly active HN user as well! https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mark_l_watson https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mark_l_watson
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- davidrupp 3y ago
  "Bragging" seems unnecessarily pejorative. Reading the information about his patents didn't sway me one way or the other the first time I visited his site, but I can see it being relevant data for some of his audience. The (superior) content of his books did sway me, as did Mark's willingness to make many of them available for free. I've since had occasion to interact personally with Mark, and I've unfailingly found him to be gracious and personable; "braggart" does not apply, in my experience.
- myth_drannon 3y ago
  It's just a basic resume credentials, the same as job experience. There is another HN thread talking having personal projects online. Whatever increases your changes to put the leg in the door, do it.

lettergram 3y ago

Having worked with Mark for a couple of years (he was my manager), I got to hear many stories. One of the more interesting was when he got special permission from his employer at the time to purchase / access a lisp machine. Wealth of knowledge, good programmer, definitely worth reading his books (if interested in a topic he covers)

emmelaich 3y ago
Nice, what was the year? Approximately.
KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
More importantly, he’s a GOFAI engineer who understands modern ML. Folks like him are rare (especially those of his generation who are still actively coding).
- tromp 3y ago
  Had to look that up: "Good old fashioned artificial intelligence"
  - freilanzer 3y ago
    I always read it as "gang of four ai" first.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
    GOFAI is basically "artificial intelligence" algorithms that don't involve neural networks or statistical learning. Deep Blue and Prolog (knowledge bases aka "expert systems") are your typical examples. They usually involve sophisticated tree construction and hand coded search algorithms. Modern ML also has tree stuff and symbolic algorithms but they are all heavily augmented by deep learning and probabilistic methods like Monte Carlo. When people say Lisp was used for "AI research" and that it suffered from the "AI winter", GOFAI is what they are referring to. Neural networks exist back then but they were very small scale, good enough for some signal processing applications and as research curiosities but most of the powerful emergent capabilities were never truly realized until post millenium.

behnamoh 3y ago

The historical hype around Lisp is from back when the alternative was C. https://manifold.markets/Alana/convince-me-will-i-learn-lisp-in-20#g3OvGgqVhOBjyNwDMx4C https://manifold.markets/Alana/convince-me-will-i-learn-lisp...

lacrimacida 3y ago
Haha, no. Modern PLs have reached parity with Lisps but comparing C and Lisp is apples and oranges. C was fast no doubt but much lower level than LISP and served a different purpose. And then you proceed to link someone’s comment as a reference? Nobody is trying to convince you to use Lisp, it’s just free books you could learn from if interested. The hostility is hard to understand.
- bmitc 3y ago
  Their point was that the "superpowers" and mythology of Lisp come from a time (the 80s) in which C was the primary alternative, popular language. Standard ML came later and the further MLs in OCaml and F# came much, much later. Erlang was proprietary. Prolog was around but misunderstood and remains so. Smalltalk was there and super powerful (maybe moreso?), but as far as I understand, kept to certain machines. But now we have Elixir, Erlang, F#, OCaml, Scala, Racket, Chez Scheme, Gerbil Scheme, Chicken Scheme, Ruby, Python, Clojure, Pharo, etc. all competing with the standardized Lisp in Common Lisp. I love Lisp, or rather Scheme and its ilk, but the point is that its mythology comes from the 80s and early 90s in which it did sort of set the standard for modern languages. It's really a fantastic family of languages, but there doesn't seem to be one that really stands out as pragmatic, industrial alternatives to the other languages it has heavily inspired. It seems Clojure and Racket come close, and Common Lisp is just too "hardcore" for pragmatic use, in my opinion.
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    >Common Lisp is just too "hardcore" for pragmatic use, in my opinion. In what ways? Asking as Lisp newbie.

JaDogg 3y ago

Lisp is cool. It has that hacker feeling when you code in it. No matter the dialect :) Downloaded the whole repo, will have a look.

arookery 3y ago
Lisp is the way
bitwize 3y ago
Lisp has that cool hacker feeling because it's how software development should be done: a relatively minimal core of concepts exploding into endless possibilities, the code you write itself expressed in terms of a runtime data structure which can be traversed and manipulated, the immediacy of a REPL and directly changing a live system. It never took off because developers are modern Sisyphi, who when freed of their burdens immediately yearn for the feel and heft of the cold stone boulder in their hands. That's how we got Java: enough of Lisp to be tolerable and familiar to C++ programmers.
- epolanski 3y ago
  If lisps are that good why there's so little killer software written in it? With rare exceptions like emacs and clojure's datomic I feel like such a lauded language should have more to show. And yet, there's comparatively much more killer applications written in php alone than all lisps combined. I am proficient in several lisps by the way (Racket, CL, Emacs Lisp, Scheme) and honestly every time I need to start a "serious" project I just feel like any other language depending on the use case is a better fit.
  - JaDogg 3y ago
    Popularity does not mean good. Also I assume most killer apps use right tool for the job - For example in a corporate setting with multiple developers something like Java would be better. I speculate the following - if there are few developers who love lisp, then all can try to mob program a lisp code base -- multiple cursors, same time (code review and development all happen parallel). (Not sure if such an editor exists) This would be a good way to maintain a lisp code base I think (speculation). (Compared to Java where you can work mostly alone and make a mess and it will still work somewhat OK)

chii 3y ago

I wish github just linked pdfs to the google viewer, so that it could be read without having to download the file to disk! for example: https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fmark-watson%2Ffree-older-books-and-software%2Fmain%2Fopencontent%2Fclojureai.pdf https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fra... I guess its possible to make a bookmarklet for it...

JBiserkov 3y ago
I clicked the first one, it's readable in the browser for me? https://github.com/mark-watson/free-older-books-and-software/blob/main/opencontent/AIprog.pdf https://github.com/mark-watson/free-older-books-and-software...
qwerty456127 3y ago
Can't you change this in your browser config? I remember changing this back and forth a number of times during my life, depending on what was more convenient for me given the nature of the jobs I was predominantly doing during those days. Nowadays I would prefer PDFs (notably including those served as data URIs) to be automatically cached to a dedicated directory and opened in an external PDF reader but I had no time to configure this so far.

jacquesm 3y ago

Mark is right here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mark_l_watson https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mark_l_watson

distcs 3y ago
I have learnt a great deal about modern state of Lisp from comments written by Mark and others like pjmlp on HN. By reading their comments I've learnt that Lisp is relevant in non-Lisp languages too. So many programming languages borrow concepts that were explored in Lisp languages. And not just Lisp. ML too. Their comments helped me learn this kind of background. If I could get a directory of active Lisp devs who comment on HN that would be great! Maybe even create a feed out of their comments. Is there any feed of any kind on HN? Even a basic RSS feed could be useful. I could pull the whole feed and filter them out for their comments.
- nuclearnice1 3y ago
  You may enjoy this old book. http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html

gooseus 3y ago

Title isn't accurate, this seems to be a link to all of Mark Watson's older books: including books on Lisp, Haskell, Java, and personal stories. Looks like this PR from a couple months ago was him moving a bunch of older books from his personal website into this repo: https://github.com/mark-watson/free-older-books-and-software/commit/5011bcfce3bda68c53b2162c7b1ed77158f0f4fb https://github.com/mark-watson/free-older-books-and-software...