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Comment by damsdu78 | Hacker News Reader

Do you think it is useful for a Lisp noob?

This book is sort of a trap because some of the macros it defines make assumptions that are not guaranteed by the language specification: every once in a while, you’ll find people on IRC or similar asking for help with some of the examples from this book.

Also, IMO, the defmacro/g macro defined in this book would have been better defined as a reader macro than as a codewalking macro.

> make assumptions that are not guaranteed by the language specification

I haven't read it, I have to confess. It would be useful if those assumptions were explicitly mentioned and explained in the book.

Some of the advanced macro stuff is easily outside of the standard and can be still useful, which for example lacks some of the environment features described in CLtL2.

If I recall somewhere around SBCL 1.2 they changed the way the backquote worked (totally fine for them to do that as it wasn't specified in the standard..) which broke the Let over Lambda macro.

I think CCL still works.

The code here should fix the problems : https://github.com/thephoeron/let-over-lambda

Note, it's been a while since I looked at it so I could have some of the details wrong. The book is still well worth reading to help you understand the possibilities with a programmable programming language, but just bear in mind the various caveats..

I think it’s a great second book. For a first I’ve always recommended Practical Common Lisp. I don’t know if that recommendation is still up to date.

I'd simply give newbies this link http://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/

Yeah, that's an excellent — and modern — guide.

I would recommend it to a Lisp enthusiast as a third after On Lisp. That's how I read it, anyway.

Many things in LOL are quite opinionated. I don't think it's a distillation of knowledge (like On Lisp), but rather an exploration how far you can take some things (macros).

As a reminder, Paul Graham's On Lisp is freely downloadable, in PDF or PostScript via links on this page at PaulGraham.com:

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html

No, it's not. Others have suggested other great books for beginners, like Practical Common Lisp. You'll get the most from Let Over Lambda after you've already got a bit of experience with Lisp.

Definitely not. The book expands on pg's books and a prior read is recommended.

Read On Lisp before Let Over Lambda, but after a beginner book like Practical Common Lisp.

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