Show HN: "Programming Algorithms in Lisp” Book

Hi, I'm the author.

For those who haven't heard about the book yet: it is a practical description of the main data structures and algorithms in use today. The book is also featuring a presentation of the most important algorithm development techniques, as well a examples of the real-world use cases in each chapter. It uses Common Lisp as an implementation language, and also contains a crash course into the language if you are not yet familiar with it.

For those who have already seen or even read the previous version published on Leanpub, here is a summary of the updates: http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com/2021/02/programming-algori...

As usual, AMA.

Is the big underlying motive for LISP its connection with symbolic AI?

Is the goal of this book to teach algorithms to Lisp programmers, or to teach algorithms using Lisp as its a good pedagogical language, or something else?

First, I still find it very jarring to see "LISP" written that way when referring to Common Lisp, and most other languages in the Lisp family, as "Lisp" has been the common way of writing it for a very long time. That styling, now, is mostly found in older texts on the subject or when talking about LISP and LISP 1.5 and a few other specific implementations.

Second, Common Lisp is a general purpose, multiparadigm language. There's a lot to like about it. If you want to implement conventional procedural algorithms, the language is well-suited to writing in that style. If you want to adopt a more functional and recursive (versus iterative) style, it is similarly well-suited (though somewhat implementation dependent as CL, unlike Scheme, does not mandate tail call elimination, which can bite you in performance). If you want to write in an OO-style, it has a way to do that (though it is different than the OO-styles many people are familiar with so takes some time to learn). And if you like writing DSLs (but don't want to implement a full parser or an interpreter but would rather have something compiled for better performance), it's very well-suited for it.

Third, while it was commonly used for symbolic AI, it is not restricted to that domain. But, if that's what you want to use it for, you should look into the book Paradigms of AI Programming by Norvig (now available for free online) which is pretty much just about implementing now classic symbolic AI programs in CL.

More of the second: i.e. teach algorithms using Lisp. The secondary goal is to get people more accustomed with Lisp.