8 ms·
Lisp outside the Box (O'Reilly book)
- randallsquared 17y agoThis from the publisher that used to have "no lisp books" in their submission guidelines. :)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Scriptor 17y agoAny reason for that?
- randallsquared 17y agoI don't know what the reason was, but you can probably find someone mentioning it by searching the threads referencing the publisher in comp.lang.lisp, from 5-6 years ago.
- jedi_stannis 17y agoThe reason seems to just be that LISP books generally don't sell well. And it seems to still be in their submission guidelines. http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/writeforus_1101.html http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/writeforus_1101.html "Books on topics that have dismal sales despite quality books being available. (If you're addressing a topic where good books have sold dismally in the past (for instance, LISP, LaTeX, or Web-based training),"
- Semiapies 17y agoWell, maybe LISP stuff is moving out of the "doesn't sell" category.
- pchristensen 17y agoI wish he would have included a chapter on the condition system. I've had a hard time wrapping my head around it. Everyone says "It's great, but you have to see it in action."
- mahmud 17y agoHere is a "style guide" that's been missing. http://random-state.net/log/3453016738.html http://random-state.net/log/3453016738.html The condition system really does need a treatise on its own, specifically as a generic custom control-flow toolkit. There are hairy bits in the standard wrt to the debugger interface, but the above links clarifies many things.
- jdale27 17y agoMaybe it's not too late: This is very much a draft outline. Both overall breakdown and specific chapter titles are likely to change over the coming months. In any case, I though the chapter on conditions in PCL was pretty good: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-conditions-and-restarts.html http://gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-condit...
- jimbokun 17y agoWhat I like best about the table of contents is that: "Hmm, maybe it's time we mentioned Lists" is chapter 9. Good way to escape the programming urban legend that "In Lisp, lists are the only data structure."
- pchristensen 17y agoIt was Ch12 in Practical Common Lisp. 12. They Called It LISP for a Reason: List Processing - http://gigamonkeys.com/book/they-called-it-lisp-for-a-reason-list-processing.html http://gigamonkeys.com/book/they-called-it-lisp-for-a-reason...
- polos 17y agoLists are the most ingenious data structures possible; Nature uses them exclusively -- or what do you think DNA or our brain ore molecules are consisting of? (You don't have 'arrays' or 'hashes' in Nature, and why would you need them? Read on:) The only difficulty with lists is interconnection with other list elements; Nature uses this heavily, and our brain would not be possible without these inter-connections. So -- lists as used in our current computer systems may be slow, but they are still the best data structure ever created.
- randallsquared 17y agoMaybe you have a point I'm missing, but I'd think it was obvious that Nature uses mappings... ;)
- kleevr 17y agoWhat about the parts of the (human) brain that are just some wet-wired differential processing grid. Though their phenotype is ultimately prescribed in DNA (granted a list), I wouldn't be surprised to find that many of those "moving parts" are more efficiently approximated/realized by things like 'hashes' (etc) as opposed to lists. (My apologies if I'm out of my depth here.)
- Scriptor 17y ago
- asciilifeform 17y agoSo "outside" now means "inside"? Lisp is reviled because it doesn't play nicely with "modern" (read: broken-by-design) technologies like MS-Windows and the WWW stack. Any attempt to make the language more cube-farm-friendly really ought to be called a boxing-in, rather than the opposite.
- thunk 17y agoCalling an FFI tutorial an "attempt to make the language more cube-farm-friendly" is needlessly incendiary. The fact is, there are lots of C wheels out there that don't need reinventing, and calling them from a REPL is useful and mischievous and fun.
- ionfish 17y agoFrom what I've gleaned from the direction of many recent discussions on haskell-cafe, the good FFI support is a huge reason that Haskell is starting to fail to avoid success.
- twopoint718 17y agoI still love that motto.