Post #336187

2026-02-17 15:52 UTC

Well, today is the day. I&#39;m finally &quot;sorta happy enough to pull the trigger&quot; on publishing the book I&#39;ve been working on for a very long time. It&#39;s a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for &quot;tech-adjacent&quot; and &quot;tech-interested&quot; people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy in 1958 and today still going strong (to the extent that many people see it as the most powerful programming language in existence). And this is a time for shameless self promotion, even if you don&#39;t plan on buying the book, please repost :-). Self-publishing is self-marketing, so there we go. If you do buy and read it, please let me know how you liked it! The book landing page, https://berksoft.ca/gol, has links to all outlets where you can buy the book,

Replies (14)

@Kremerk@mastodon.social 2026-02-17 20:33

@cdegroot Ik heb er eentje besteld. Ben benieuwd!

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@lispwizard@techhub.social 2026-02-18 07:11

@cdegroot Just ordered it, should arrive on Monday.

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@rasur@mastodon.social 2026-02-18 07:17

That looks excellent! BTW the link has an extra comma which might need fixing 😉

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@NormanDunbar@mastodon.scot 2026-02-18 07:28

@cdegroot Good luck with the book. Cheers.

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@amoroso@oldbytes.space 2026-02-18 11:14

@cdegroot A great angle for telling the history of Lisp. Is the ebook DRM-free?

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@cyclical_obsessive@fosstodon.org 2026-02-18 13:41

@cdegroot “Those who cannot remember the past are destined to repeat it” I’m not sure we should enshrine LISP into Claude Code, even though I once wrote LISP that flew in a cruise missile, and several “expert systems” for critical applications, it seems likely the “AI”s might choose LISP to enable the singularity. Emacs and LISP - Live it, love it, remember it!

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@tealeg@mastodon.online 2026-02-18 15:30

@cdegroot fabulous - ordered a physical copy from Lulu. Congratulations. I'm looking forward to reading it!

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@Linkshaender@bildung.social 2026-02-18 16:15

@cdegroot Congrats! Just ordered a physical copy. 👍🏼

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@owiecc@en.osm.town 2026-02-18 19:30

@cdegroot I love technical history books! Purchased a copy.

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@NortherlyGoose@c.im 2026-02-19 03:59

@cdegroot@mstdn.ca The Kobo EPUB version makes it very difficult to see the formulas in the first few chapter. It's very blurry. The following images is a X2 magnification.

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@Roundtrip@federate.social 2026-02-18 22:30

@cdegroot Congratulations and thanks! I’m enjoying the epub edition from Lulu: “People writing Lisp code to do old-style AI are engaged in a creative act of discovery, an attempt to understand… To discover requires a different sort of language, and it requires a different approach, captured well by the writer Joan Didion: I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. –Joan Didion, “Why I Write” Richard P. Gabriel Foreword #lisp

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@rooneymcnibnug@mastodon.social 2026-02-18 23:32

@cdegroot this looks awesome and lisp has piqued my interest for some time now without having "jumped in" too much - going yo grab a copy of this, thanks!

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@PastaThief@indiepocalypse.social 2026-02-19 00:04

@cdegroot OOOO, that sounds interesting! I go buy now!

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@AstroHyde@mastodon.social 2026-02-19 00:08

@cdegroot this is excellent! I'm so excited for this, it looks awesome!

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