On Lisp: Happy 20th Birthday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6348557

by brudgers • 13 years ago

73 36 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

According to Amazon: On Lisp was published September 9, 1993.

bad_alloc• 13 years ago

You can download it for free[1], as it went out of print some years ago.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html

fvrghl• 13 years ago

This book helped me fall in love with Lisp.

garfee• 13 years ago

happy birthday

stewdio• 13 years ago

Looking forward to time tourism. Would be great fun to go back to 1993 and chat about On Lisp, get in touch with Chris Carter about his upcoming series, and catch the In Utero tour. (Among other things.)

lifeisstillgood2• 13 years ago

Sorry to be boringly practical but if you go remember :

winner 1993 world baseball series - Toronto Blue Jays. Now take the winnings and buy Netscape stock:-)

stesch3• 13 years ago

Am I a bad person for using Common Lisp for a short time (a few years) and then giving up on it completely?

mullr• 13 years ago

It can take a few tries before things start to click. It also helps quite a lot to be using a modern variant (Clojure, probably Racket)

stesch3• 13 years ago

I tried getting back into Lisp a few months ago. With "Realm of Racket". I was bored 1/4 of the book.

And Clojure isn't for me. I'm no JVM user.

wglb• 13 years ago

No this does not make you a bad person.

I took the better part of a year to feel quite comfortable with Lisp. A few years later, I am still learning things.

It does take you in a different direction than all of the most popular languages. Personally, it has been worth the effort.

stesch3• 13 years ago

In 2004 I was comfortable enough to release some open source code in Common Lisp. Around 2008 I stopped using it.

flagnog• 13 years ago

It basically spoiled programming in every other work language for me. Sometimes enlightenment brings pain.

gw• 13 years ago

Earlier this year, I was working for a small software company whose products were mainly PHP and Perl programs held together with duct tape. Our manager was doing some spring cleaning by removing old programming books from our shelf, shouting the titles out, and tossing them in a trash bag.

After a dozen obsolete books on Windows, Visual Basic, and so on, he shouted out "On Lisp". I was already using Clojure at home, and I recognized the author, so I lunged for it. None of the other programmers had even heard of Lisp, and had no idea why we had the book, so they let me keep it. I wonder how many other old, crusty software shops have gems like that just collecting dust.

Nekorosu• 13 years ago

A truly horrifying story!

drcode• 13 years ago

FYI you'll want to check its value on the used book market.

vukmir2• 13 years ago

"None of the other programmers had even heard of Lisp..."

To the HN crowd, this is almost unbelievable, but it is not the worst I've heard. This summer, going on a vacation, I sat next to a working programmer who's knowledge of programming and the programming languages begins and ends with C#. He had no knowledge of Ruby, Perl, Python, open source, git, ...

copiga2• 13 years ago

that may be due to where they learned, I am doing a HND in computer science and we are learning C# and nothing else...

before i began i knew (well enough to make use of) C, vala and a small amount of lisp and PHP

bliti4• 13 years ago

I have a couple of older books that were found in the same manner. From people who studied anything computer related in the 70s and 80s. I lost some copies on a flood, but still have a small, but nice collection. Including one of those "Teach Yourself Perl Guide Books", with Internet Explorer 5 as a bonus (on a CD).

eccp• 13 years ago

There are Clojure versions of the examples from the book by Stuart Halloway [1] and Michael Fogus [2]

[1] http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2008/12/12/on-lisp-clojure

[2] http://blog.fogus.me/tag/onlisp/

lispm• 13 years ago

Price at Amazon starts at $100 and goes up to $1900.

Insane.

But shows how much a classic it is.

lifeisstillgood2• 13 years ago

Fascinating - 1900 bucks for a book that has a free PDF download must be a bot pricing war. Amazed to hear those are still up and running,

pg2• 13 years ago

Thanks!

bliti4• 13 years ago

How has the book aged?

coolsunglasses4• 13 years ago

About as well as anything related to Common Lisp. It's abstract enough that some of the macro patterns are reusable in Clojure, but we don't often use them in Clojure.

Anybody that wants a deeper understanding of Lisp should read, but with the understanding that it's not a shake-n-bake recipe book.

The last time I wrote an anaphoric macro (let alone the scope-capturing one), the Clojure IRC channel had a heart-attack.

pg2• 13 years ago

Though this may sound odd, I don't know. I haven't read any of it for a long time.

brudgers• 13 years ago

any time.

norvig• 13 years ago

Congratulations, PG!

benjamta• 13 years ago

Goodness, that makes me feel old. I remember On Lisp very fondly.

epsylon• 13 years ago

Happy birthday !

Discussion 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6273692

In the discussion was mentioned this link (thanks @nonrecursive!) with instructions to print your own copy on lulu :

http://www.lurklurk.org/onlisp/onlisp.html

On Lisp: Happy 20th Birthday

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