A book on algorithmic programming in Lisp | Hacker News Reader

A book on algorithmic programming in Lisp

leanpub.com

141 pointsvseloved17 comments

To the author:

- Numerous Thanks

- Found a typo in the acknowledgement section, you managed to misspell Robert Strandh's name :D

thanks for the notice (my typing habit is such that I often don't press the keys hard enough which results in missing letters - easy to see thanks to the spellcheckers when a normal word is misspelled, not so hard for personal names though). Typo fixed

Hello, thanks for the book. It seems we'll have to learn RUTILS. Anyway in machine learning and other fields python and java have huge libraries. I think the algorithms part is the best since lisp libraries can't compete with other libraries like the more than 8000 packages for R. Don't know what happened to clasp (C++ Lisp), and other gnu scientific libraries, ffi. Other languages and libraries are moving fast (Nim, Julia, Cristal, Kotlin, Rust), but lisp macros are still strong. I would like to predict a bright future for Lisp but I don't see anyway it can compete with all the other options.

Thank you for this book!

Lisp is great. It's so much fun writing Lisp. Coding Lisp with Emacs/Slime is almost an enlightening experience.

However, I never quite got over the frustration that writing the same thing in C++ gives factor two, three or whatever speedup. There is not much that can be done about this, I'm afraid. It's a tragedy.

It depends on what you code and how. I hope the book explains some of the approaches and describes the tools that can be used to reduce that difference and avoid a tragedy :)

I would also recommend Edi Weitz's book "Common Lisp Recipes" for that. He offers great insights on how to improve performance.

Is there consensus on the most common and advisable tooling setup for newcomers in Common Lisp?

There's a pretty good overview in this writeup (which is the most recent one): https://ambrevar.xyz/modern-common-lisp/index.html

Spacemacs with the common-lisp layer sets you up.

Slime running on the Emacs of your choice would be a good start - as a Lisp implementation I would recommend SBCL, which is free and has an amazing compiler compiling to native code.

Alternatively, you could try the free version of Lispworks.

If you don't want the additional learning curve of Emacs and Slime, the author recommends just using sbcl and rlwrap (which makes programming in a terminal nicer).

Please don't. Half of the joy of hacking in Common Lisp is working with amazing environments such as Slime and the LispWorks IDE.

https://portacle.github.io/

Not consensus, but here's a counterpoint to all the folks implying "spend a year learning emacs". I made a failed run on "Practical Common Lisp" twice because I also tried to learn emacs at the same time, partially because of commment threads like this. I eventually went with Atom (my normal text editor) and atom-slime, and had a happy experience.

Maybe you would be shunned if you showed up at a professional CL shop for using such a setup, but if you are just wanting to try out CL for personal learning don't let emacs stop you.

This looks great. I read and learn best from paper. Do you have any plans for releasing physical copies? Maybe through Lulu?

Yes, I plan to have a paperback version for $20+shipment. If you send me an email to vseloved@gmail.com I'll include you in the distribution (and send the details on how to pay and receive a copy in a week or two)

Judging from first scan, this book seems to be a very good book. Thanks for the link!

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