Mark Watson's Lisp books

https://github.com/mark-watson/free-older-books-and-software/tree/main/opencontent

by KRAKRISMOTT • 3 years ago

235 49 3 years ago

github.com

blueberry87• 3 years ago

+1 for "Brady_story".

harry8• 3 years ago

what score change +/- should there be for bragging about having "... 55 US patents"?

mindcrime• 3 years ago

And also a fairly active HN user as well!

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mark_l_watson

davidrupp• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Nice, what was the year? Approximately.

KRAKRISMOTT2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Had to look that up: "Good old fashioned artificial intelligence"

julianeon• 3 years ago

I’d love to read a write up of someone buying a Lisp machine and then coding in it. It’s a fascinating historical what could have been, if they had survived to the present day.

behnamoh• 3 years ago

The historical hype around Lisp is from back when the alternative was C.

https://manifold.markets/Alana/convince-me-will-i-learn-lisp...

lacrimacida• 3 years 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.

bmitc6• 3 years 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.

JaDogg2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Lisp is the way

bitwize2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

chii• 3 years 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%2Fra...

I guess its possible to make a bookmarklet for it...

JBiserkov• 3 years ago

I clicked the first one, it's readable in the browser for me?

https://github.com/mark-watson/free-older-books-and-software...

qwerty456127• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Mark is right here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mark_l_watson

distcs• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Mark Watson's Lisp books

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