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There is a great book about Lisp from Christian Queinnec titled "Lisp in Small Pieces" or LISP. Here is a little excerpt from it. "There are subjects treated h
by hydandata 11y ago
There is a great book about Lisp from Christian Queinnec titled "Lisp in Small Pieces" or LISP. Here is a little excerpt from it.
"There are subjects treated here that can be appreciated only if you make an effort proportional to their innate difficulty. To harken back to something like the language of courtly love in medieval France, there are certain objects of our affection that reveal their beauty and charm only when we make a chivalrous but determined assault on their defenses; they remain impregnable if we don't lay siege to the fortress of their inherent complexity. In that respect, the study of programming languages is a discipline that demands the mastery of tools, such as the lambda calculus and denotational semantics. While the design of this book will gradually take you from one topic to another in an orderly and logical way, it can't eliminate all effort on your part."
Lisp has some of the best literature around of any programming language. Anybody who really cares about craft of programming should make use of wisdom therein.
- mkramlich 11y agoseeing this comment on HN, made my PG, a Lisp book author, is amusing. I have to admit that while I don't do Lisp day-to-day probably my favorite Lisp book(s) were written by him. The practical hacker in me prefers Python, Java and C. But the elegant hacker in me? Prefers Lisp. And PG captured that in his writing.
- PuercoPop 11y agoIDK where the elegant but impractical (as it was a trade off). CL is a practical language. Consider loop, format, multiple values or the standard methd combination in CL. While the only practical thing about python is that it has more libraries. Nevermind the fact that python scope is misdesigned even in Python 3!