7 ms·

Show HN: I wrote a technical history book on Lisp

252 points by cdegroot 8mo ago

The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my current projects, Common Lisp is a better fit, so I call myself "a Lisp-er" these days. If people like what I did, I do have plans to write some more (but probably only after I retire, writing next to a full-time job is heard). Maybe on Smalltalk, maybe on computer networks - two topics close to my heart. And a shout-out to Dick Gabriel, he contributed some great personal memories about the man who started it all, John McCarthy.

emigre 8mo ago
I will take a look, it looks really interesting. Thanks for the effort. I'm also interested in Lisp. I think you might like this: 'The evolution of Lisp' by Guy L. Steele and Richard P. Gabriel. https://doi.org/10.1145/234286.1057818 https://doi.org/10.1145/234286.1057818
- emigre 8mo ago
  This one is similar but about Haskell, and is quite interesting as well: 'A history of Haskell: being lazy with class' by Paul Hudak, Simon Peyton Jones et al. https://doi.org/10.1145/1238844.1238856 https://doi.org/10.1145/1238844.1238856
- nocman 8mo ago
  I think it is worth noting that Richard P. Gabriel wrote the forward to the book in question, and he quotes Guy L. Steele in that forward -- from the paper that you are suggesting the author might like.
  - emigre 8mo ago
    Yes, so it makes sense that he'll like it, if he did not know the paper already.
  - emigre 8mo ago
    Or you mean he'll probably already know about the paper? Yes, I guess that's probably the case... I did not think about it too much to be honest, I just knew that article and thought that he would really like it if he had not read it. But I can imagine somebody writing a book on the history of Lisp has already read probably all articles around on the topic. I just did not think about it for too long.
    - cdegroot 8mo ago
      Yup, I know of that paper. The amount of (not or partly acknowledged) reading I've done for the book borders on the insane so I do welcome these suggestions, I've forgotten 80% of what I read and learning what others value helps me put together a "you really should revisit this" list :)
wduquette 8mo ago
Sounds very cool. I've dabbled with Lisp on and off since the mid-80's, starting with a text adventure in LISP-80 on a Kaypro 4, and though I've never written a serious project in Lisp I've learned a great deal from it. (Wrote a lot of TCL code once upon a time; I've always thought of TCL as a Lisp in which you do a lot of things backwards.)
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  I think "minimalistic" languages like Tcl, and Lua, took a good look at Lisp before starting off.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
emigre 8mo ago
I have some feedbak, nothing major, but I would say that a professional designer could help you improve the book cover. Right now somebody with professional experience in graphic design --or a good eye for design-- can probably see details in it that could be improved. It's a pity if you have worked on this for five years, not to present it in the best possible way.
- DerArzt 8mo ago
  It's more likely that they focused on the book's content rather than the cover art for 5 years
  - emigre 8mo ago
    I have not said that he should spend five years focusing on the cover of the book.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  Yup. I'm not happy with the design. Some promised assistance fell through and so I had to scramble last minute. I've seen worse though :) (Specific tips on improving the current design welcome, most stores allow edits)
  - emigre 8mo ago
    Yes, yes, definitely, it's okay. I like the design, actually. :) But it would be nice to have the touch of a professional, if you can. I would say that your choice of cover design as a whole denotes elegance and taste. Look at the cover design of graphic designer Manuel Estrada: https://estradadesign.eu/project/alianza-editorial/ https://estradadesign.eu/project/alianza-editorial/ Your cover remind me of that kind of style. There are some details about the typeface, layout, and the photograph that, as somebody with a certain background in graphic design, I can perceive as a little bit off.
    - cdegroot 8mo ago
      The photograph was chosen because I could not find other computer books with that somewhat harsh color scheme, and you gotta stand out :)
kamma4434 8mo ago
I skimmed the index but… no Clojure? My impression is that it is by far the most used current Lisp. This said, I’d love to read the book - definitely interesting.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  There's a whole chapter on Clojure, don't worry :) (that's probably why it didn't make the index)
- mark_l_watson 8mo ago
  chapter 13 covers Clojure
spariev 8mo ago
Great book, I will definitely buy it, thanks for your work! The history is very important, as you’ve said in your blog post, but companies and universities don’t care much about such things unfortunately. I see there is a chapter on Clojure, so just wondering if you had the chance to interview Rich Hickey for the book?
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  No, I didn't. I probably should have, but the sheer magnitude of the project ran off with all my good ideas :). There's already a bunch of things I want to add in a second edition, if that ever happens, there are just so many stories to tell and only so much time. .
emigre 8mo ago
Having some personal memories about John McCarthy included in the book is amazing.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  Yeah, you can't imagine how happy I was when first RPG sent me some of that material to help me out with background and then said yes when I asked him for permission to include them verbatim in my book. He's such a good writer.
Jach 8mo ago
This is a nice and unexpected release, thanks for writing it. Getting a RPG endorsement is great. I just finished reading his foreword and skimming the table of contents and bibliography from the preview. I'd have liked to see a sample of a middle chapter to really see how technical and deep it gets (e.g. Land of Lisp gives its chapter 8 as a sample which I think is very representative for that book). But I plan to get this book regardless -- just not right now. The back blurb hints that expert systems might be mentioned, but how much? No one ever seems to go much into their implementation or usage.[0] It also mentions writing some JS, which I guess is part of chapter 5, I wonder if that was a publisher request. (My favorite take on that subject in recent years is https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp) Would it be fair to say this is mainly a history told through the lens of AI and PL research? Amusingly I think part of me is already setting myself up for some disappointment -- it seems too short with too few references! But it's good to have a Lisp history book like this looks to be and I'm sure I'll learn things from it, and the promise of more RPG writings inside is enticing. Besides, any complete telling would take multiple books. (There's so much of historical interest locked up in proprietary applications and companies with their own histories, and so many papers published, there's also so much that can be dug through in the standardization mailing list (and other lists, like emacs) archives[1], the SAIL archives[2], the Xerox PARC archives[3], the CMU archives[4], and the many undigitized things sitting in boxes at the computer history museum...[5]) [0] Norvig's PAIP gives a small taste, one of the files: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/mycin-r.lisp https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/mycin-r.l... And a book about a particular system, MYCIN: https://www.shortliffe.net/Buchanan-Shortliffe-1984/MYCIN%20Book.htm https://www.shortliffe.net/Buchanan-Shortliffe-1984/MYCIN%20... And a short video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a65uwr_O7mM https://youtube.com/watch?v=a65uwr_O7mM [1] http://ml.cddddr.org/ http://ml.cddddr.org/ and http://cl-su-ai.lisp.se/ http://cl-su-ai.lisp.se/ [2] https://www.saildart.org/ https://www.saildart.org/ [3] The url I had before is down... I made a local copy but https://archive.org/details/2014.01.ftp.parc.xerox.com https://archive.org/details/2014.01.ftp.parc.xerox.com might be the same content [4] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/ai/0.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/... [5] Even in the earliest Lisp reports like https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42766480_Artificial_Intelligence https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42766480_Artificial... there are interesting things mentioned like a two-move checkmate program or "Other projects on which work continues include the Advice Taker, visual pattern recognition, and an artificial hand." Multiple times I've tried to track down those sorts of things mentioned in really old papers only to hit dead-ends on so many of them. Sometimes things were embellished, or were abandoned, or were just lost to time, and sometimes there's an undigitized box at the museum that might contain printouts etc. (There might be MYCIN source code, even.)
emigre 8mo ago
Positive feedback: really nice that this is available in Rakuten Kobo (as a Kobo user).
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  I'm Canadian. Need to support what little we have here we call "tech industry" even when it's Japanese owned these days :)
alexhans 8mo ago
Great endeavour. Land of lisp is still one of my favourite alternative programming books. One thing about the sample. Is there a chance to get a glimpse of a random chapter you like a lot? Most of it seems to be foreword/acknowledgement and a bit on "what is lisp" which I suspect most who are attracted might already know.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  > Is there a chance to get a glimpse of a random chapter you like a lot? +1, I'm this close of ordering the hard-cover version, but really hesitant when there is zero samples, not even a page or two, makes it really hard to have any sort of expectation and figuring out if the price is worth it or not.
  - cdegroot 8mo ago
    Yeah, it's one of the things that I wanted to do and then I was undecided which chapter to pick. But your criticism is valid, I'll pick a chapter and cut it out from the PDF and put it up hopefully later tonight (EST). Watch this space and don't hesitate to prod me :)
  - cdegroot 8mo ago
    https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf (and of course the stuff that Amazon has in their preview, which amazingly goes all the way through the introductory chapter but yeah, misses something meatier than that).
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      That's great, thank you so much! Looks like a joy to read, and zero complaints or feedback. Now awaiting the arrival of my copy :)
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  Yup, https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf hopefully serves you better.
bitwize 8mo ago
It's Cees de Groot! Or "Carpe Grootem" as my brain has called him for years. I remember his contributions to the Squeak community from back in the day.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  These days it's all "I am Groot" :-) _waves a branch_
  - bitwize 8mo ago
    I saw your GitHub profile pic. A while back I reported to a guy with the first name Jean-Luc. His avatar picture in HipChat (which was still a thing back then) was, of course, Picard...
HackerThemAll 8mo ago
"arguably the most powerful programming language in the history of computing" That can be said about quite a few languages, Forth included. The most powerful != easy to use and/or comprehend.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  That's why I said "arguably", of course. But, to be honest: Forth is great, but... well... there's no "easy mode" Forth. Whereas there is "easy mode" Scheme - even SICP starts with a very simple and gentle up ramp - so I'd argue to give the honours to Lisp (I'm putting Smalltalk in second place). But that's my personal opinion, I get to put it on my book cover, that's all :-)
jll29 8mo ago
I felt, like some of the other commenters, that I was close to buying the book, but that the sample on Amazon wasn't helping to support a buying decision. But thankfully the bibliography is given on the book's Web site in full, so I just checked if the most important paper on the history of early LISP [1] was cited or not. It wasn't, so I'm going to pass on ordering the book's first edition. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/800055.802047 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/800055.802047
- emigre 8mo ago
  Thanks for sharing that paper, I didn't know about it. It looks really interesting.
  - pmcjones 8mo ago
    And here's an English translation of the History chapter from Stoyan's 1980 book _LISP-Anwendungsgebiete, Grundbegriffe, Geschichte_ [LISP Application, Basic Concepts, History]: https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/book/Stoyan-Geschichte.pdf https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/book/S...
    - emigre 8mo ago
      Really nice of you to share it, thank you.
    - emigre 8mo ago
      I will read them over the weekend.
    - cdegroot 8mo ago
      Thanks. Even though I'm originally from Europe, the book has ended up somewhat focused on what happened on the continent where I now live. It's something I'm planning to fix for a potential second edition.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  Soo.... the book has a bit of a history (see the acknowledgements). When I worked with a publisher, "academic" things like a bibliography were somewhat de-emphasized and the tooling was not nearly as nice as, well, BibTeX. So we went for a very short bibliography containing works that were directly quoted. I did read the paper way back when doing research for the first chapters, but over the years the reference got lost and that's the main reason it didn't make it in. But you're right, it (and many, many, _many_ other things) does belong in the bibliography.
Keyframe 8mo ago
what's the print like on amazon ones (.de)? I ordered two books once from lulu and woved never to do that again. Print was unreadable, and I'm not _that_ picky. They blamed it on the authors prep and offered a refund though. I was so mad, and still am that it turned me away from them completely though, unless someone tells me they worked at least some QA in their process.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  I would expect it to be good - it's typeset with LaTeX and shipped as a regular (vector) PDF, the rest is on Lulu/Amazon but I don't expect issues there. To be completely honest, I'm still waiting for the author copy from Lulu, which I'm using as a final check before allowing wider distribution (channels that don't allow quick fixes). But I've ordered several books from Lulu in the past, and they were fine, to my (amateur) eyes looked the same as something from a regular publisher (the modern ones likely use the same/similar print-on-demand hardware).
- globular-toast 8mo ago
  I've found Lulu to be decent quality, much better than other print on demand books like Lightning Source (used by O'Reilly). But they are only a printer/binder and can't correct typesetting problems (well, I suppose they could help or reject them, but I guess they don't).
  - cdegroot 8mo ago
    Yup. They have a lot of resources available on how to do it but what gets printed is 100% the author's (or publisher's) responsibility.
cenazoic 8mo ago
Thank you, looks great! Have you seen Behind the Parentheses, by Mark Jones Lorenzo? It goes into quite a lot of technical details about how things like eval/apply were implemented for example, and the larger academic and business contexts eg FORTRAN and earlier language development. I’m a Lisp newbie (and mostly here for the Emacs Lisp) so a fair amount was beyond me, but I still found it quite readable and interesting.
jcynix 8mo ago
The bibliography contains a typo, namely entry 5 misses an "l" in Allegro. And a book, which I'd call "an Oldie but Goldie" could be added: John Allen's "Anatomy of Lisp" (1978) which still is an excellent read for those who want to dive deep into Lisp's interna. One might also call it a precursor of SICP, as it covers a number of introductory topics too. Abstract: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/542865 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/542865
- jcynix 8mo ago
  And here's some interesting background info on the late John Allen which I just stumbled upon: John Allen (1937-2022) and Anatomy of LISP https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2024/04/11/1249/ https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2024/04/11/1249/
  - mark_l_watson 8mo ago
    excellent. Also cool that Allen wrote TCL Lisp.
  - pmcjones 8mo ago
    And it's worth pointing out here that the book itself is now freely available: https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/542865 https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/542865
    - nyankosensei 8mo ago
      Maybe I’m missing something, but that webpage only seems to provide a PDF containing the beginning of the book (up through the Preface). Perhaps you need a ACM Digital Library Premium subscription to access the entire book?
      - pmcjones 8mo ago
        Sigh -- they keep changing the rules. I think you have to have a free ACM account. If you send me an email (see my home page in my profile), I'll send you a PDF.
cdegroot 8mo ago
People requested more sample material than Amazon provides, and that's a perfectly understandable request. Chapter 8, about Scheme, it is. https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf is where you can read it.
mark_l_watson 8mo ago
I always buy every Lisp related book I see. I bought this book on Kobo as an eBook. So far, I have spent less than an hour looking through a few sections; fun stuff! I like the wide variety of code snippets mixed with background and history. I will revisit our discussion here in a day or two after I finish reading this book.
throwaway81523 8mo ago
Chapter 8 sample pdf has a typo(?) in the first paragraph. Carl Hewitt's last name is spelled both Hewitt and "Hewitz", maybe even in the same sentence. Using an accumulation parameter with tail recursion was per Wikipedia introduced in one of the LTU papers, sometime before Scheme. So the description in the chapter is at best imprecise. But, I would want to look further back historically to see whether any Algol compilers used the technique. Overall the book looks readable as an intro to Lisp and Lisp implementation, but in a history book I'd like to see more precision and depth, careful citations, etc.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  Darn, I had his name wrong and fixed it, but somewhere an undo button must have been hit. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm more than happy to add corrections to an already "longer than zero" list of errata. I'll give the Scheme chapter and Wikipedia a once-over to see where I went off the rails.
  - throwaway81523 8mo ago
    There's also an issue where Hewitt's actors were more like Erlang processes, i.e. unlike Scheme closures, they could run independently of each other. Maybe call/cc can simulate something like that. I remember the footnote in SICP claiming that Scheme was developed partly to understand what Hewitt was talking about, but I think that might not have been serious. It could be worth trying to talk to Steele or Sussman about this history.
    - cdegroot 8mo ago
      Yup, and the book mentions that, including the surprising result that (Hewitt-style) actors - which are not completely like Erlang processes - and Scheme's closures were the same.
throwaway81523 8mo ago
Ok I looked at the bibliography. Best I can say is that this book might be ok for a cross-section of Lisp history but I'd like to see something much more thorough, especially regarding early Lisp, and with more of a PLT perspective. Why all those citations of Gödel but nothing(?) about typed lambda calculus or the Kleene-Rosser paradox (that Church's untyped lambda calculus is logically inconsistent)? Do you have anything about Lisp 2? About significant Lisp applications like Macsyma, that drove the language's development? It would be awesome to have a comprehensive Lisp history bibliography perhaps built around user contributions, something like Richard Jones's garbage collection bibliography https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gcbib/ https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gcbib/ .
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  When writing a book, you can't make everybody happy. I wrote this for a somewhat general techie audience and already had debates about the amount of math material in the lead-up to LISP I :-). Especially here on HN, there's a better-than-average chance that people will want more, something more encyclopedic, and I get that but "ok for a cross-section of Lisp history" already fills a book, I had to stop somewhere. Too much for some, not enough for others, hopefully "mostly ok" for most readers, it's all I can aim for. And +1 on a comprehensive Lisp history bibliography, that's a great idea.
  - throwaway81523 8mo ago
    > When writing a book, you can't make everybody happy. The usual reason a reader might be unhappy is that something they wanted to see isn't there. So the solution is put in as much as you possibly can ;). Maybe future editions can be bigger and more comprehensive. OTOH there seems to be quite a lot of what amounts to implementation tutorials. Maybe that's not needed in a history book. In a history book I'm more interested in sources than narrative. Although, some interviews with important Lispers would also be cool. I can understand not wanting to put in too much math and theory and that's fine. I can't really tell what is there and what isn't beyond getting some hints from the bibliography entries. This (by McCarthy) showed up immediately when I searched for something unrelated, some articles by Jeff Barnett about Lisp 2: http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf This is a link dump about Lisp 2: https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/lisp2_family.html https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/lisp2_... I have been wanting to look into Lisp 2 because it had supposedly had an interesting trick in its GC. It was a compacting mark/sweep GC but had an antecedent of generational GC where it usually wouldn't bother trying to reclaim memory that had already survived compaction once. I've been interested in re-implementing that trick in some modern implementations for small MCUs.
musicale 8mo ago
Technical history or "internal history" is great. Regular historians writing "external history" of computing tend to focus on certain topics, such as business and economic issues, politics, personalities, or occasionally social impact, while omitting the details of the technology itself - which are often of great interest to practitioners, and which help us understand why things happen to work the way they do. Of course people who experienced things firsthand often have interesting personal as well as technical insight. CHM's oral histories often provide a combination of both. I also always enjoy: https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html
rurban 8mo ago
Cees: typo in chapter 8. "specifically on recursrive". Always loved actors, but unfortunately scheme didn't champion them.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  Thanks. An initial list of errata will appear this weekend (probably tomorrow). I think I'll add a RSS feed for it :) W.r.t. actors and scheme: the whole thing is that Sussman and Steele started Scheme to figure out actors, did some hacking to do async stuff on top of Maclisp, essentially, and then found out that their stuff and (Hewitt-style) actors were the same. So I guess Scheme took "the same but a different" path early on, pretty much how Erlang and Golang are pretty much similarly powerful systems, expressing the same functionality in different ways.
nxobject 8mo ago
This is amazing. I’m tempted to read it backwards just to see the Lisp I know get more and more alien, until we reach the Benjamin Button stage of m-expressions.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  The book goes back a bit more, so you'd end at Church :-)
mchaver 8mo ago
Great work. I've put it on my to read list for this year. I currently use Haskell and OCaml/ReScript (with Emacs!), but I always enjoy reading Lisp books and imagine my self building systems in Lisp and exploring code in the REPL. Could you talk about some of your experiences of building software in Lisp?
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  It's... "different". I think there are two big things going on: one is the fact that "refactoring" never ends, as you can mold the language around your problem. Ultimately that level of expressiveness makes the hard parts of your code more concise, more readable (as the code ends up being closer to the domain at hand), and therefore more maintainable. The other thing, which it shares with Smalltalk and which I've seen pretty much nowhere else (Erlang comes very close) is the interactivity. You code inside a running system. Yes, other languages have things they call "the REPL", but they can't deal with classes changing shape, reloading code, etc. It makes the coding cycle much shorter, quicker feedback is better feedback, so you end up going faster (and iterating through complex stuff like that macro that will really nail how clean your top level code is will be much more doable) When I mentor coders, I often talk about malleable code, like the clay on a potter's table. As soon as you stop working it, things start solidifying and your code turns into something unchangeable and brittle. I think Lisp's traits (which I otherwise only found in Smalltalk) help you push back that point, maybe indefinitely.
throwaway81523 8mo ago
Is this book written with AI? I see some indicators but it's not a sure thing.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  Absolutely not. I created every mistake painstakingly by hand ;-)
cdegroot 8mo ago
There's now a list of errata which I'll keep working on, https://berksoft.ca/gol/errata_1.html https://berksoft.ca/gol/errata_1.html

252 points by cdegroot 8mo ago

emigre 8mo ago

I will take a look, it looks really interesting. Thanks for the effort. I'm also interested in Lisp. I think you might like this: 'The evolution of Lisp' by Guy L. Steele and Richard P. Gabriel. https://doi.org/10.1145/234286.1057818 https://doi.org/10.1145/234286.1057818

emigre 8mo ago
This one is similar but about Haskell, and is quite interesting as well: 'A history of Haskell: being lazy with class' by Paul Hudak, Simon Peyton Jones et al. https://doi.org/10.1145/1238844.1238856 https://doi.org/10.1145/1238844.1238856
nocman 8mo ago
I think it is worth noting that Richard P. Gabriel wrote the forward to the book in question, and he quotes Guy L. Steele in that forward -- from the paper that you are suggesting the author might like.
- emigre 8mo ago
  Yes, so it makes sense that he'll like it, if he did not know the paper already.
- emigre 8mo ago
  Or you mean he'll probably already know about the paper? Yes, I guess that's probably the case... I did not think about it too much to be honest, I just knew that article and thought that he would really like it if he had not read it. But I can imagine somebody writing a book on the history of Lisp has already read probably all articles around on the topic. I just did not think about it for too long.
  - cdegroot 8mo ago
    Yup, I know of that paper. The amount of (not or partly acknowledged) reading I've done for the book borders on the insane so I do welcome these suggestions, I've forgotten 80% of what I read and learning what others value helps me put together a "you really should revisit this" list :)

wduquette 8mo ago

Sounds very cool. I've dabbled with Lisp on and off since the mid-80's, starting with a text adventure in LISP-80 on a Kaypro 4, and though I've never written a serious project in Lisp I've learned a great deal from it. (Wrote a lot of TCL code once upon a time; I've always thought of TCL as a Lisp in which you do a lot of things backwards.)

cdegroot 8mo ago
I think "minimalistic" languages like Tcl, and Lua, took a good look at Lisp before starting off.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

emigre 8mo ago

I have some feedbak, nothing major, but I would say that a professional designer could help you improve the book cover. Right now somebody with professional experience in graphic design --or a good eye for design-- can probably see details in it that could be improved. It's a pity if you have worked on this for five years, not to present it in the best possible way.

DerArzt 8mo ago
It's more likely that they focused on the book's content rather than the cover art for 5 years
- emigre 8mo ago
  I have not said that he should spend five years focusing on the cover of the book.
cdegroot 8mo ago
Yup. I'm not happy with the design. Some promised assistance fell through and so I had to scramble last minute. I've seen worse though :) (Specific tips on improving the current design welcome, most stores allow edits)
- emigre 8mo ago
  Yes, yes, definitely, it's okay. I like the design, actually. :) But it would be nice to have the touch of a professional, if you can. I would say that your choice of cover design as a whole denotes elegance and taste. Look at the cover design of graphic designer Manuel Estrada: https://estradadesign.eu/project/alianza-editorial/ https://estradadesign.eu/project/alianza-editorial/ Your cover remind me of that kind of style. There are some details about the typeface, layout, and the photograph that, as somebody with a certain background in graphic design, I can perceive as a little bit off.
  - cdegroot 8mo ago
    The photograph was chosen because I could not find other computer books with that somewhat harsh color scheme, and you gotta stand out :)

kamma4434 8mo ago

I skimmed the index but… no Clojure? My impression is that it is by far the most used current Lisp. This said, I’d love to read the book - definitely interesting.

cdegroot 8mo ago
There's a whole chapter on Clojure, don't worry :) (that's probably why it didn't make the index)
mark_l_watson 8mo ago
chapter 13 covers Clojure

spariev 8mo ago

Great book, I will definitely buy it, thanks for your work! The history is very important, as you’ve said in your blog post, but companies and universities don’t care much about such things unfortunately. I see there is a chapter on Clojure, so just wondering if you had the chance to interview Rich Hickey for the book?

cdegroot 8mo ago
No, I didn't. I probably should have, but the sheer magnitude of the project ran off with all my good ideas :). There's already a bunch of things I want to add in a second edition, if that ever happens, there are just so many stories to tell and only so much time. .

emigre 8mo ago

Having some personal memories about John McCarthy included in the book is amazing.

cdegroot 8mo ago
Yeah, you can't imagine how happy I was when first RPG sent me some of that material to help me out with background and then said yes when I asked him for permission to include them verbatim in my book. He's such a good writer.

Jach 8mo ago

This is a nice and unexpected release, thanks for writing it. Getting a RPG endorsement is great. I just finished reading his foreword and skimming the table of contents and bibliography from the preview. I'd have liked to see a sample of a middle chapter to really see how technical and deep it gets (e.g. Land of Lisp gives its chapter 8 as a sample which I think is very representative for that book). But I plan to get this book regardless -- just not right now. The back blurb hints that expert systems might be mentioned, but how much? No one ever seems to go much into their implementation or usage.[0] It also mentions writing some JS, which I guess is part of chapter 5, I wonder if that was a publisher request. (My favorite take on that subject in recent years is https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp) Would it be fair to say this is mainly a history told through the lens of AI and PL research? Amusingly I think part of me is already setting myself up for some disappointment -- it seems too short with too few references! But it's good to have a Lisp history book like this looks to be and I'm sure I'll learn things from it, and the promise of more RPG writings inside is enticing. Besides, any complete telling would take multiple books. (There's so much of historical interest locked up in proprietary applications and companies with their own histories, and so many papers published, there's also so much that can be dug through in the standardization mailing list (and other lists, like emacs) archives[1], the SAIL archives[2], the Xerox PARC archives[3], the CMU archives[4], and the many undigitized things sitting in boxes at the computer history museum...[5]) [0] Norvig's PAIP gives a small taste, one of the files: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/mycin-r.lisp https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/mycin-r.l... And a book about a particular system, MYCIN: https://www.shortliffe.net/Buchanan-Shortliffe-1984/MYCIN%20Book.htm https://www.shortliffe.net/Buchanan-Shortliffe-1984/MYCIN%20... And a short video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a65uwr_O7mM https://youtube.com/watch?v=a65uwr_O7mM [1] http://ml.cddddr.org/ http://ml.cddddr.org/ and http://cl-su-ai.lisp.se/ http://cl-su-ai.lisp.se/ [2] https://www.saildart.org/ https://www.saildart.org/ [3] The url I had before is down... I made a local copy but https://archive.org/details/2014.01.ftp.parc.xerox.com https://archive.org/details/2014.01.ftp.parc.xerox.com might be the same content [4] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/ai/0.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/... [5] Even in the earliest Lisp reports like https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42766480_Artificial_Intelligence https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42766480_Artificial... there are interesting things mentioned like a two-move checkmate program or "Other projects on which work continues include the Advice Taker, visual pattern recognition, and an artificial hand." Multiple times I've tried to track down those sorts of things mentioned in really old papers only to hit dead-ends on so many of them. Sometimes things were embellished, or were abandoned, or were just lost to time, and sometimes there's an undigitized box at the museum that might contain printouts etc. (There might be MYCIN source code, even.)

emigre 8mo ago

Positive feedback: really nice that this is available in Rakuten Kobo (as a Kobo user).

cdegroot 8mo ago
I'm Canadian. Need to support what little we have here we call "tech industry" even when it's Japanese owned these days :)

alexhans 8mo ago

Great endeavour. Land of lisp is still one of my favourite alternative programming books. One thing about the sample. Is there a chance to get a glimpse of a random chapter you like a lot? Most of it seems to be foreword/acknowledgement and a bit on "what is lisp" which I suspect most who are attracted might already know.

embedding-shape 8mo ago
> Is there a chance to get a glimpse of a random chapter you like a lot? +1, I'm this close of ordering the hard-cover version, but really hesitant when there is zero samples, not even a page or two, makes it really hard to have any sort of expectation and figuring out if the price is worth it or not.
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  Yeah, it's one of the things that I wanted to do and then I was undecided which chapter to pick. But your criticism is valid, I'll pick a chapter and cut it out from the PDF and put it up hopefully later tonight (EST). Watch this space and don't hesitate to prod me :)
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf (and of course the stuff that Amazon has in their preview, which amazingly goes all the way through the introductory chapter but yeah, misses something meatier than that).
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    That's great, thank you so much! Looks like a joy to read, and zero complaints or feedback. Now awaiting the arrival of my copy :)
cdegroot 8mo ago
Yup, https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf hopefully serves you better.

bitwize 8mo ago

It's Cees de Groot! Or "Carpe Grootem" as my brain has called him for years. I remember his contributions to the Squeak community from back in the day.

cdegroot 8mo ago
These days it's all "I am Groot" :-) _waves a branch_
- bitwize 8mo ago
  I saw your GitHub profile pic. A while back I reported to a guy with the first name Jean-Luc. His avatar picture in HipChat (which was still a thing back then) was, of course, Picard...

HackerThemAll 8mo ago

"arguably the most powerful programming language in the history of computing" That can be said about quite a few languages, Forth included. The most powerful != easy to use and/or comprehend.

cdegroot 8mo ago
That's why I said "arguably", of course. But, to be honest: Forth is great, but... well... there's no "easy mode" Forth. Whereas there is "easy mode" Scheme - even SICP starts with a very simple and gentle up ramp - so I'd argue to give the honours to Lisp (I'm putting Smalltalk in second place). But that's my personal opinion, I get to put it on my book cover, that's all :-)

jll29 8mo ago

I felt, like some of the other commenters, that I was close to buying the book, but that the sample on Amazon wasn't helping to support a buying decision. But thankfully the bibliography is given on the book's Web site in full, so I just checked if the most important paper on the history of early LISP [1] was cited or not. It wasn't, so I'm going to pass on ordering the book's first edition. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/800055.802047 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/800055.802047

emigre 8mo ago
Thanks for sharing that paper, I didn't know about it. It looks really interesting.
- pmcjones 8mo ago
  And here's an English translation of the History chapter from Stoyan's 1980 book _LISP-Anwendungsgebiete, Grundbegriffe, Geschichte_ [LISP Application, Basic Concepts, History]: https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/book/Stoyan-Geschichte.pdf https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/book/S...
  - emigre 8mo ago
    Really nice of you to share it, thank you.
  - emigre 8mo ago
    I will read them over the weekend.
  - cdegroot 8mo ago
    Thanks. Even though I'm originally from Europe, the book has ended up somewhat focused on what happened on the continent where I now live. It's something I'm planning to fix for a potential second edition.
cdegroot 8mo ago
Soo.... the book has a bit of a history (see the acknowledgements). When I worked with a publisher, "academic" things like a bibliography were somewhat de-emphasized and the tooling was not nearly as nice as, well, BibTeX. So we went for a very short bibliography containing works that were directly quoted. I did read the paper way back when doing research for the first chapters, but over the years the reference got lost and that's the main reason it didn't make it in. But you're right, it (and many, many, _many_ other things) does belong in the bibliography.

Keyframe 8mo ago

what's the print like on amazon ones (.de)? I ordered two books once from lulu and woved never to do that again. Print was unreadable, and I'm not _that_ picky. They blamed it on the authors prep and offered a refund though. I was so mad, and still am that it turned me away from them completely though, unless someone tells me they worked at least some QA in their process.

cdegroot 8mo ago
I would expect it to be good - it's typeset with LaTeX and shipped as a regular (vector) PDF, the rest is on Lulu/Amazon but I don't expect issues there. To be completely honest, I'm still waiting for the author copy from Lulu, which I'm using as a final check before allowing wider distribution (channels that don't allow quick fixes). But I've ordered several books from Lulu in the past, and they were fine, to my (amateur) eyes looked the same as something from a regular publisher (the modern ones likely use the same/similar print-on-demand hardware).
globular-toast 8mo ago
I've found Lulu to be decent quality, much better than other print on demand books like Lightning Source (used by O'Reilly). But they are only a printer/binder and can't correct typesetting problems (well, I suppose they could help or reject them, but I guess they don't).
- cdegroot 8mo ago
  Yup. They have a lot of resources available on how to do it but what gets printed is 100% the author's (or publisher's) responsibility.

cenazoic 8mo ago

Thank you, looks great! Have you seen Behind the Parentheses, by Mark Jones Lorenzo? It goes into quite a lot of technical details about how things like eval/apply were implemented for example, and the larger academic and business contexts eg FORTRAN and earlier language development. I’m a Lisp newbie (and mostly here for the Emacs Lisp) so a fair amount was beyond me, but I still found it quite readable and interesting.

jcynix 8mo ago

The bibliography contains a typo, namely entry 5 misses an "l" in Allegro. And a book, which I'd call "an Oldie but Goldie" could be added: John Allen's "Anatomy of Lisp" (1978) which still is an excellent read for those who want to dive deep into Lisp's interna. One might also call it a precursor of SICP, as it covers a number of introductory topics too. Abstract: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/542865 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/542865

jcynix 8mo ago
And here's some interesting background info on the late John Allen which I just stumbled upon: John Allen (1937-2022) and Anatomy of LISP https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2024/04/11/1249/ https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2024/04/11/1249/
- mark_l_watson 8mo ago
  excellent. Also cool that Allen wrote TCL Lisp.
- pmcjones 8mo ago
  And it's worth pointing out here that the book itself is now freely available: https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/542865 https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/542865
  - nyankosensei 8mo ago
    Maybe I’m missing something, but that webpage only seems to provide a PDF containing the beginning of the book (up through the Preface). Perhaps you need a ACM Digital Library Premium subscription to access the entire book?
    - pmcjones 8mo ago
      Sigh -- they keep changing the rules. I think you have to have a free ACM account. If you send me an email (see my home page in my profile), I'll send you a PDF.

cdegroot 8mo ago

People requested more sample material than Amazon provides, and that's a perfectly understandable request. Chapter 8, about Scheme, it is. https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf is where you can read it.

mark_l_watson 8mo ago

I always buy every Lisp related book I see. I bought this book on Kobo as an eBook. So far, I have spent less than an hour looking through a few sections; fun stuff! I like the wide variety of code snippets mixed with background and history. I will revisit our discussion here in a day or two after I finish reading this book.

throwaway81523 8mo ago

Chapter 8 sample pdf has a typo(?) in the first paragraph. Carl Hewitt's last name is spelled both Hewitt and "Hewitz", maybe even in the same sentence. Using an accumulation parameter with tail recursion was per Wikipedia introduced in one of the LTU papers, sometime before Scheme. So the description in the chapter is at best imprecise. But, I would want to look further back historically to see whether any Algol compilers used the technique. Overall the book looks readable as an intro to Lisp and Lisp implementation, but in a history book I'd like to see more precision and depth, careful citations, etc.

cdegroot 8mo ago
Darn, I had his name wrong and fixed it, but somewhere an undo button must have been hit. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm more than happy to add corrections to an already "longer than zero" list of errata. I'll give the Scheme chapter and Wikipedia a once-over to see where I went off the rails.
- throwaway81523 8mo ago
  There's also an issue where Hewitt's actors were more like Erlang processes, i.e. unlike Scheme closures, they could run independently of each other. Maybe call/cc can simulate something like that. I remember the footnote in SICP claiming that Scheme was developed partly to understand what Hewitt was talking about, but I think that might not have been serious. It could be worth trying to talk to Steele or Sussman about this history.
  - cdegroot 8mo ago
    Yup, and the book mentions that, including the surprising result that (Hewitt-style) actors - which are not completely like Erlang processes - and Scheme's closures were the same.

throwaway81523 8mo ago

Ok I looked at the bibliography. Best I can say is that this book might be ok for a cross-section of Lisp history but I'd like to see something much more thorough, especially regarding early Lisp, and with more of a PLT perspective. Why all those citations of Gödel but nothing(?) about typed lambda calculus or the Kleene-Rosser paradox (that Church's untyped lambda calculus is logically inconsistent)? Do you have anything about Lisp 2? About significant Lisp applications like Macsyma, that drove the language's development? It would be awesome to have a comprehensive Lisp history bibliography perhaps built around user contributions, something like Richard Jones's garbage collection bibliography https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gcbib/ https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gcbib/ .

cdegroot 8mo ago
When writing a book, you can't make everybody happy. I wrote this for a somewhat general techie audience and already had debates about the amount of math material in the lead-up to LISP I :-). Especially here on HN, there's a better-than-average chance that people will want more, something more encyclopedic, and I get that but "ok for a cross-section of Lisp history" already fills a book, I had to stop somewhere. Too much for some, not enough for others, hopefully "mostly ok" for most readers, it's all I can aim for. And +1 on a comprehensive Lisp history bibliography, that's a great idea.
- throwaway81523 8mo ago
  > When writing a book, you can't make everybody happy. The usual reason a reader might be unhappy is that something they wanted to see isn't there. So the solution is put in as much as you possibly can ;). Maybe future editions can be bigger and more comprehensive. OTOH there seems to be quite a lot of what amounts to implementation tutorials. Maybe that's not needed in a history book. In a history book I'm more interested in sources than narrative. Although, some interviews with important Lispers would also be cool. I can understand not wanting to put in too much math and theory and that's fine. I can't really tell what is there and what isn't beyond getting some hints from the bibliography entries. This (by McCarthy) showed up immediately when I searched for something unrelated, some articles by Jeff Barnett about Lisp 2: http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf This is a link dump about Lisp 2: https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/lisp2_family.html https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/lisp2_... I have been wanting to look into Lisp 2 because it had supposedly had an interesting trick in its GC. It was a compacting mark/sweep GC but had an antecedent of generational GC where it usually wouldn't bother trying to reclaim memory that had already survived compaction once. I've been interested in re-implementing that trick in some modern implementations for small MCUs.

musicale 8mo ago

Technical history or "internal history" is great. Regular historians writing "external history" of computing tend to focus on certain topics, such as business and economic issues, politics, personalities, or occasionally social impact, while omitting the details of the technology itself - which are often of great interest to practitioners, and which help us understand why things happen to work the way they do. Of course people who experienced things firsthand often have interesting personal as well as technical insight. CHM's oral histories often provide a combination of both. I also always enjoy: https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html

rurban 8mo ago

Cees: typo in chapter 8. "specifically on recursrive". Always loved actors, but unfortunately scheme didn't champion them.

cdegroot 8mo ago
Thanks. An initial list of errata will appear this weekend (probably tomorrow). I think I'll add a RSS feed for it :) W.r.t. actors and scheme: the whole thing is that Sussman and Steele started Scheme to figure out actors, did some hacking to do async stuff on top of Maclisp, essentially, and then found out that their stuff and (Hewitt-style) actors were the same. So I guess Scheme took "the same but a different" path early on, pretty much how Erlang and Golang are pretty much similarly powerful systems, expressing the same functionality in different ways.

nxobject 8mo ago

This is amazing. I’m tempted to read it backwards just to see the Lisp I know get more and more alien, until we reach the Benjamin Button stage of m-expressions.

cdegroot 8mo ago
The book goes back a bit more, so you'd end at Church :-)

mchaver 8mo ago

Great work. I've put it on my to read list for this year. I currently use Haskell and OCaml/ReScript (with Emacs!), but I always enjoy reading Lisp books and imagine my self building systems in Lisp and exploring code in the REPL. Could you talk about some of your experiences of building software in Lisp?

cdegroot 8mo ago
It's... "different". I think there are two big things going on: one is the fact that "refactoring" never ends, as you can mold the language around your problem. Ultimately that level of expressiveness makes the hard parts of your code more concise, more readable (as the code ends up being closer to the domain at hand), and therefore more maintainable. The other thing, which it shares with Smalltalk and which I've seen pretty much nowhere else (Erlang comes very close) is the interactivity. You code inside a running system. Yes, other languages have things they call "the REPL", but they can't deal with classes changing shape, reloading code, etc. It makes the coding cycle much shorter, quicker feedback is better feedback, so you end up going faster (and iterating through complex stuff like that macro that will really nail how clean your top level code is will be much more doable) When I mentor coders, I often talk about malleable code, like the clay on a potter's table. As soon as you stop working it, things start solidifying and your code turns into something unchangeable and brittle. I think Lisp's traits (which I otherwise only found in Smalltalk) help you push back that point, maybe indefinitely.

throwaway81523 8mo ago

Is this book written with AI? I see some indicators but it's not a sure thing.

cdegroot 8mo ago
Absolutely not. I created every mistake painstakingly by hand ;-)

cdegroot 8mo ago

There's now a list of errata which I'll keep working on, https://berksoft.ca/gol/errata_1.html https://berksoft.ca/gol/errata_1.html