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In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

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Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#81

Post by dreamcompiler »

sireat wrote: post #17
s_Hogg wrote: post #13

Why is HN this interested in Lisp anyway? Not saying it's a good or bad language, just don't quite get why it receives as much attention as it does.

HN exists because of LISP. More precisely PG attributed success of Viaweb to LISP (speed of iteration etc) http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html I am pretty sure the key factor was having a small and talented team. It didn't have to be LISP. They could have used another language they were familiar with.

That's not what pg has said. He said lexical closures were critical to Viaweb's success, and no popular language offered them except Javascript, which was decidedly not a server language in those days.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#83

Post by dreamcompiler »

toyg wrote: post #61
mepian wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python already existed at that time for 4 years, at least.

Python didn't even have lambda/map/filter/reduce until '94. Lisp was already Lisp.

Python's lexical closures are still crippled even today, no?

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#85

Post by TJSomething »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #83
toyg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python didn't even have lambda/map/filter/reduce until '94. Lisp was already Lisp.

Python's lexical closures are still crippled even today, no?

Since Python 3 added the nonlocal keyword, they seem to be fine, although I haven't examined them too closely.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#86

Post by ken »

s_Hogg wrote: post #13

Why is HN this interested in Lisp anyway? Not saying it's a good or bad language, just don't quite get why it receives as much attention as it does.

i. From the Jargon File: "The dominant HLL among hackers until the early 1980s, LISP has since shared the throne with C." Even though it's not the dominant HLL today, it's been around for 50 years. There's a lot of area under that curve.

ii. It's properly a family of languages, and they usually have "Lisp" in the name (plus Scheme, and now Clojure -- still a small enough set you can remember them all). The Algol family of languages don't all have "Algol" in the name, and the Simula-style object systems don't all have "Simula" in the name, even though both of those are extremely popular today.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#87

Post by xrd »

srean wrote: post #75
xrd wrote: post #64

I wrote a book for O'Reilly ( https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/ ) and I only say that because what I'll say next is controversial. First, there must be a huge market for technical books that don't appeal to Lisp fanatics. There are people coming from nontraditional backgrounds into technical roles, and they, I assert, probably want a different book than the types of books O'Reilly generally publishes, whi…

> There are people coming from nontraditional backgrounds into technical roles, and they, I assert, probably want a different book than the types of books O'Reilly generally publishes. ... and "the for Dummies" does not cater to them ? Or are you saying that O'Reilly should become somewhat more like the "Dummies" Series. Regardless of the name some of those books dont speak to the reader as if the reader is a dummy.…

I hate the dummies books too. People that consider themselves intelligent don't want to buy a book that forces you to call yourself a dummy. I'm saying there is another space for people that feel they are intelligent and don't yet have the knowledge about programming and could do it given the right introductions.

O'Reilly speaks to me too, but I think there is entire population of people that aren't familiar with Tim O'Reilly and buy books from his publisher to join that community of thinkers. And that's a shame.

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#88

Post by JoelMcCracken »

rjurney wrote: post #48
detaro wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't someone's experience attempting to write a technical book (even if they failed for personal reasons) belong on Hacker News? EDIT: above post originally said "This doesn't belong on Hacker News", but is has been edited out.

It’s the emails I object to.

Do you know that no permission was obtained?

Re: In May 2009 O'Reilly agreed to publish a book about Common Lisp (2011)

#90

Post by eddieh »

xrd wrote: post #87
srean wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are people coming from nontraditional backgrounds into technical roles, and they, I assert, probably want a different book than the types of books O'Reilly generally publishes. ... and "the for Dummies" does not cater to them ? Or are you saying that O'Reilly should become somewhat more like the "Dummies" Series. Regardless of the name some of those books dont speak to the reader as if the reader is a dummy.…

I hate the dummies books too. People that consider themselves intelligent don't want to buy a book that forces you to call yourself a dummy. I'm saying there is another space for people that feel they are intelligent and don't yet have the knowledge about programming and could do it given the right introductions. O'Reilly speaks to me too, but I think there is entire population of people that aren't familiar with Tim…

I think you're right about this. I'd much rather read LISP for Poets or LISP for Future Presidents than something with a title that is insulting or degrading. There's probably a considerable market for books that educate and respect the reader.
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