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Comment by 4thaccount | Hacker News Reader

I've been through that one a few times. I like the author's sense of humor and how he covers the history of lisp.

He is one of several people to help the lisp revival. However, after going through the book I realized that there wasn't anything here I couldn't do in arguably less lines of code in Python. SBCL would of course run much faster at least.

The prototypical niche languages (Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth, APL) are all amazing, but I've found that there are some good reasons they don't tend to take off. Some have been talked about on here ad nauseum though, so I will refrain from bringing it up.

Best of luck in your journey. There are a lot of really great lisp books out there!

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> Best of luck...

thanks. this is my first programming book. about 13 years ago, a good friend turned me onto org-mode (and the emacs contagion, haha!). that kinda got me started on my developer journey. i recognized then that, for myself, i'd have to make a decision about what language to learn first, and it was a tossup between javascript (super popular at the time) and lisp.

i'm primarily a javsacript dev these days, with a few applications in production. as i start getting my feet wet with react & python, it's interesting to learn these two in parallel with lisp (lambdas, anybody?). i like what i sense as the honesty of lisp, it's so much less encumbered with methods, etc... and somehow more inscrutable.

i think i'll really like the data handling capabilities when i get my head wrapped around it, and i'm looking forward to some graph problems down the road. and then there's the passionate part of me that believes in foss/emacs & owning/contributing the entirety of my toolchain, so i'm doubly glad to be working with it in spac/emacs.

for the sibling comments, thanks for the recommendations. i'll probably need to get a couple more books before i really grok it.

As you or probably know, the best way is to really write a bunch of code. I've read a few lisp books and get the point of many topics and am even comfortable with a good bit of the language, but I don't fully grok it, because I don't have a good use case to try things out on.

You might be interested in Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Peter Norvig. It showcases pretty amazing examples of conciseness and expressivity.

I haven't "read" it, but have flipped through it (definitely not the same thing of course) and looked at Norvig's lisp and Python code and can say he is waaay smarter than I am :)

It was a pleasure to read a bit of his work.

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