Live data from Hacker News

The Land of Lisp

landoflisp.com

51–60 of 146 posts

Re: The Land of Lisp

#51
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I have seen, code that "goes straight to the point" is usually poorly thought out, is unmaintanable, has bugs, is difficult to extend to new use-cases, and the developer who wrote it is long gone.

That might be (perhaps) true in other languages, but that is not the point in Lisp.

Best practices, patterns, idioms are all important no matter what language. Lisp is not special in this regard (although, I admit, Lisp developers may stick around a bit longer).

Re: The Land of Lisp

#52

This book is destined to be a classic programming book, just as "The C programming language", "The Little Schemer" or "Operating systems: Design and implementation". I would really like to meet Conrad Barski and give him a great hug. And invite him a good beer. Be sure to read the comic that is on the bottom of the page!! Now, to be honest, a quicker or more practical introduction to Lisp would be the "Practical Comm…

I was exposed to this book in my Algorithms class last year as the book to learn Lisp if we wanted to. The professor himself was a huge Lisper.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#53
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was greatly disappointed with this book because none of the 'Game' examples had a graphical interface to them. They are all text based. Chapter 19 is titled "Creating a Graphical, Web-Based Version of Dice of Doom".

Unfortunately, this web-based version is just printing text to the browser instead of a repl in the other examples.

By "text" do you mean "SVG code that is rendered into images the user can click on"? Because that's what it's doing: https://i.imgur.com/iqdZ8l4.png and I think calling that a "text based" game is wrong.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#54
I loved this book! I've always enjoyed retro text-based games and this was a fun way for me start learning a more functional style of programming (and Lisp). It was a nice contrast to my daily C++ work.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#56
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be (perhaps) true in other languages, but that is not the point in Lisp.

Best practices, patterns, idioms are all important no matter what language. Lisp is not special in this regard (although, I admit, Lisp developers may stick around a bit longer).

There is a big difference between language idioms and design patterns.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#57
I love this book and it certainly deserves some attention, but is there anything new that is newsworthy? Has a new edition been released? Just wondering if I missed something.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#59
This book comes up in #lisp on freenode every so often, and the channel is generally split on whether or not to recommend it. I generally do.

It's fun and lighthearted. Using games as a medium to teach the language is something some people enjoy, and is a lot less dry than most programming books.

It avoids taking sides on the editor war, by just ignoring it altogether and teaching Lisp. This is refreshing compared to most books, which hit you with the Emacs cinderblock to the face right in the preface.

It also stays away from ASDF and Quicklisp and even the entire package system in general, which is a lot of extra complexity that can be overwhelming to beginners at first (though they'll eventually need to learn about this if they want to continue using Common Lisp).

The main issue people have with the book is that it uses CLISP-specific code in a few places. CLISP's last release was seven years ago, and because it hasn't really been maintained it's beginning to bitrot. Folks in #lisp generally don't recommend using CLISP these days, instead recommending actively-maintained implementations like SBCL, CCL, ECL, ABCL, etc.

Using CLISP-specific code does allow the book to sidestep the issue of the library ecosystem, which is a plus. But a revamped version (or even a collection of errata) that ported the CLISP bits to a maintained implementation would make it a lot easier to recommend these days.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#60

This looks great! Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby really got me started in thinking for myself as a programmer. I'm looking at this book and seeing that if I read it I might fall in love with Lisp...

Yea, this definitely seems inspired by Why's style. The art is similar, the story is absurd, metaphorical, and fun. Man, I miss that guy!
Post reply on HN