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The Land of Lisp

landoflisp.com

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Re: The Land of Lisp

#121

Post by doktrin »

flavio81 wrote: post #37
drcode wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you enjoyed my book!

Hi doctor! The comic at the bottom of the web page got me laughing and in tears at the same time, in particular the line: "Back in the 80s we showed you how to program without ANY bugs ". Also, Java as a little tank, C# as a plane, Python as an helicopter... just brilliant. I almost rolled in the floor laughing by looking at that part of the strip. Certainly it is prophetic, it seems we're almost reaching the point o…

> Java as a little tank, C# as a plane, Python as an helicopter... just brilliant. I almost rolled in the floor laughing by looking at that part of the strip.

Is there a special significance to the Java / Python / Ruby / C# representations? I feel like I missed the joke here, even though I enjoyed the strip as a whole.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#122

Post by krylon »

PuercoPop wrote: post #108
flavio81 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main issue people have with the book is that it uses CLISP-specific code in a few places. This makes sense for a tutorial book, since CLISP is easy to install, very small to download (compared to SBCL), and is a fully featured (ANSI compliant) implementation. So i don't think it was a mistake to choose CLISP. The recommendation in #lisp for SBCL over CLISP might be because SBCL is nicer to the programmer, offer…

It is also because CLISP is unmaintaned. But the only implementation dependant code I remember is the socket code. But CLISP wasn't unmaintaned when the book was written más its default REPL is much better than other implementations. It was a good choice at the time.

> CLISP is unmaintaned

AFAIK, it is not really unmaintained, the developers just haven't done a release in years. When I fire up CLisp on openSUSE Tubmbleweed (their rolling release distro), it says

    Welcome to GNU CLISP 2.49.60+ (2017-06-25)
That would make me think that development might have slowed down, but not stopped.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#123

Post by krylon »

I am currently working on an interpreter for a Lisp-like language (it's too early to call it a dialect of Lisp) in Go.

I have not used Lisp at all over past couple of years, except for tweaking emacs, and I am beginning to understand that I have subconsciously missed Lisp.

It is amazing how little - if one really wants to - of Lisp one needs to implement in the host language before one can go on and write the rest in Lisp. Efficiency-wise, I expect that I will implement many things in Go for performance that could be written in Lisp.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#124

Post by Myrmornis »

hellofunk wrote: post #63

When I discovered lisp several years ago, it was indeed the textbook moment of enlightenment that you've heard about. This book was a part of that introduction for me (along with Practical Common Lisp). After working in C-like languages, I had no idea that programming could work this way as in lisp, the idea of code and data being inseparable, I even had dreams at night about run-time data structures getting expresse…

> It is a joy to read Clojure programs (the good ones, anyway) where every (non-trivial or meaningful) function has a little paragraph summarising what it does. This is just good in any language, but somewhat essential in a dynamic one.

That is an extremely controversial statement. The trouble with comments, and with programmers, is that a certain sort of brilliant programmer is very common: their intellect is fast and powerful, but they cannot contain themselves. And while their code must execute correctly, comments provide them with a limitless heaven into which they can pour their brilliance for the rest of us to read in awe, without fear of being constrained by such tedious requirements as correctness in execution, and with no requirement for precision or economy of language.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#125

Post by eklavya »

endgame wrote: post #111
drcode wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you enjoyed my book!

As an avid haskeller with a lot of respect for lisp, I've gotta say I really love the depiction of the Republic of Haskell as a police state, where side effects receive no mercy.

Wouldn’t it be more apt to say that side effects are not secondary citizens in haskell republic and they have first class support?

Re: The Land of Lisp

#126

Post by mollusk »

mmel wrote: post #106
icantdrive55 wrote: post #38

I'll get hammered for this, but there are better books. I still haven't figured out if this book is a vanity project written by a bored Doctor, or a sincere attempt to convey information. I do like the Period Table though. And maybe it's just me? I have the book on my shelf, and it's dusty. I do feel using a comic book format to convey technical information is the way to go. It should be used more often.

Can you suggest some of these "better books" ?

Not him, and I adore the geekiness/goofiness of Land of Lisp, but I found Practical Common Lisp much more helpful.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#127

Post by throwaway7645 »

flavio81 wrote: post #37
drcode wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you enjoyed my book!

Hi doctor! The comic at the bottom of the web page got me laughing and in tears at the same time, in particular the line: "Back in the 80s we showed you how to program without ANY bugs ". Also, Java as a little tank, C# as a plane, Python as an helicopter... just brilliant. I almost rolled in the floor laughing by looking at that part of the strip. Certainly it is prophetic, it seems we're almost reaching the point o…

I did really like the Haskell comments...gave me a good chuckle!

Re: The Land of Lisp

#128

Post by uxp »

krylon wrote: post #122
PuercoPop wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also because CLISP is unmaintaned. But the only implementation dependant code I remember is the socket code. But CLISP wasn't unmaintaned when the book was written más its default REPL is much better than other implementations. It was a good choice at the time.

> CLISP is unmaintaned AFAIK, it is not really unmaintained, the developers just haven't done a release in years. When I fire up CLisp on openSUSE Tubmbleweed (their rolling release distro), it says Welcome to GNU CLISP 2.49.60+ (2017-06-25) That would make me think that development might have slowed down, but not stopped.

Yet, if you visit that URL, you are greeted with :

    Current version:	2.49 (2010-07-07)
Seems like the patch level on openSUSE is provided by the package maintainer, not CLISP. It looks like Debian Wheezy is at "2.49-8.1", Ubuntu Xenial is at "2.49-9ubuntu1", FreeBSD Ports is at "2.49_6", but also marked deprecated/expired as of 2014.

I'd venture that the maintainer is applying patches to the upstream source to keep it running on the OSes when they update ABIs, etc.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#129

Post by uxp »

doktrin wrote: post #121
flavio81 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi doctor! The comic at the bottom of the web page got me laughing and in tears at the same time, in particular the line: "Back in the 80s we showed you how to program without ANY bugs ". Also, Java as a little tank, C# as a plane, Python as an helicopter... just brilliant. I almost rolled in the floor laughing by looking at that part of the strip. Certainly it is prophetic, it seems we're almost reaching the point o…

> Java as a little tank, C# as a plane, Python as an helicopter... just brilliant. I almost rolled in the floor laughing by looking at that part of the strip. Is there a special significance to the Java / Python / Ruby / C# representations? I feel like I missed the joke here, even though I enjoyed the strip as a whole.

I took it to mean that Java/Python/Ruby/C# were "old tools" with flaws (bugs), but LISP is a tool for the future.

Re: The Land of Lisp

#130

Post by throwaway7645 »

Vekz wrote: post #40

I was greatly disappointed with this book because none of the 'Game' examples had a graphical interface to them. They are all text based. Reading further in this thread people are suggesting Realm of Racket as an alternative and it looks like that book has much more visual game examples: https://realmofracket.com/games.html

Honestly that's one of the things I loved about it. Text games will work with any language without any libraries (for the most part). If I have to use Unity or Unreal, I feel like I'm really just learning how to use a framework and not useful long term programming skills. I think grand theft wumpus uses lisp to write out dot files for graphviz to consume. They skirt around using a library for that which is what I do even in languages with graphviz support.
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