41–50 of 109 posts
As somebody who read a couple of the author's books, and also somebody who spent almost a decade studying compilers, I am genuinely curious about the author himself. These works are something I both understand and would never achieve myself. These are cultural artifacts, like deeply personal poetry, made purely for the process of it. Not practically useful, not state of the art, not research level, but... a personal…
I love Lisp (I'm an Emacs user and often write in Racket for personal projects) but the one thing I never understood about the Lisp community is the emphasis placed on metacircular evaluators. I sure find them beautiful and all, but why do they take center stage so often? Beside the aesthetics and instructional value, I don't get the appeal. Also I feel that a bunch of the heavy lifting behind metacircular evaluators…
Long time lisper. It just doesn’t feel right unless your language can compile your language. It’s like wearing someone else’s underwear.
I love Lisp (I'm an Emacs user and often write in Racket for personal projects) but the one thing I never understood about the Lisp community is the emphasis placed on metacircular evaluators. I sure find them beautiful and all, but why do they take center stage so often? Beside the aesthetics and instructional value, I don't get the appeal. Also I feel that a bunch of the heavy lifting behind metacircular evaluators…
And in a way it’s like Maxwell’s equations. A simple proof of computation that also somehow implements a very neat language.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually really appreciate Racket's judicious use of square brackets in let expressions. It just makes visual parsing that much easier.
Exactly. I also like Clojure’s use of square brackets for vectors and curly braces for maps. It eliminates all the “vector- ” and “map- ” function calls.
Where does one — who has no knowledge of these prerequisites or about LISP (except that the latter has been heard in programming circles as something esoteric, extremely powerful, etc.) — start, before reading this book?
As somebody who read a couple of the author's books, and also somebody who spent almost a decade studying compilers, I am genuinely curious about the author himself. These works are something I both understand and would never achieve myself. These are cultural artifacts, like deeply personal poetry, made purely for the process of it. Not practically useful, not state of the art, not research level, but... a personal…
It is always interesting to spot a person on the interwebs who seems to actually have managed to turn buddhist or some other teachings into real world deeds. Living really modestly (IIRC, he/you also uses modest, underclocked laptops?), publishing for the benefit of many, and doing all this for years and years. Like, there seems to be no "overhead" in this way of living. Hugely inspirational.
I would also point out the "Essays" section on nmh's webpage, especially the ones discussing sensitivity and high IQ: https://t3x.org/#essays
Having purchased several of your books, thanks for your work, nmh!
Under “The Intended Audience” (page 10 of the PDF sample on the site), it says that this is not an introduction to LISP and that it would be more enjoyable with some prerequisites. Where does one — who has no knowledge of these prerequisites or about LISP (except that the latter has been heard in programming circles as something esoteric, extremely powerful, etc.) — start, before reading this book?