Post #749068

2026-03-10 10:10 UTC

I was able to finish reading all of “The Genius of Lisp“ by @cdegroot and the whole book was as good as the free preview (chapter 8). I was able to speed-read through the detailed explanations of concepts I already knew, like tail recursion, garbage collection, the Y-combinator, Currying functions, and so on. But there were parts where I slowed down and read carefully, like the section on the Universal Turing Machine, and some of the details of the IBM-704 system architecture. Also the story of how the first Lisp implementation was created when one of McCarthy’s grad students implemented an M-Expression calculator, this was described in slightly more detail than what I recall McCarthy himself explaining in his 1960 paper — that or I had just forgotten those parts of the story. The tone of this book reminds me a lot of popular physics books like Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” which was aimed more at general audiences than professionals. That said, there is a lot to enjoy about this book for professionals like myself as well. There are many good stories about the principals designers of Lisp throughout. The sections on the commercialization of Lisp for the first AI boom of the 1970s and it’s subsequent “AI winter,” were very interesting to read. And if you are a teacher, you might like how some of the concepts in the book are explained. And I would definitely recommend this very strongly to 3rd-year high school students, or 1st and 2nd year college students, who are more genuinely curious about how computers work and want to know more than just how to make the next billion dollar app. The next #LispyGopherClimate show with @screwlisp I look forward to talking about this book some more. #tech #software #Lisp #ProgrammingLanguages #SchemeLang #Scheme #Clojure #Emacs #EmacsLisp #RetroComputing #LispyGopherClimateShow

Replies (5)

@ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org 2026-03-10 10:14

@cdegroot I think you might have a factual error on page 174 in the section called “Emacs Lisp.” You write this: In a nutshell, Emacs Lisp (“elisp”) is a classical Lisp-1 with dynamic variable scoping. As you may recall, a Lisp-1 has a shared namespaces for symbols depicting variables and symbols depicting functions, while a Lisp-2 has two such namespaces; Scheme is a Lisp-1, and Common Lisp a Lisp-2. The debate on which one is better will likely never be settled, so it was probably either a coin-toss for Stallman or simpy a matter of expediency, if he thought a Lisp-1 would be simpler to implement. I believe Emacs Lisp is a Lisp-2 system, unless I am misunderstanding some finer point about the difference between Lisp-1 and Lisp-2 systems. For example, Emacs Lisp has defvar, setq, defun, and funcall. You can use setq to set the value of a variable f and you can also do something like (defun f () (princ (format f))). So unless I am mistaken, that makes Emacs Lisp a Lisp-2. @screwlisp #tech #software #Lisp

Open ##749069
@screwlisp@gamerplus.org 2026-03-10 10:40

@ramin_hal9001 How tear-jerking is the scan of McCarthy's Lasting Autograph right at the end, right! #lisp #bookstodon @cdegroot

Open ##749070
@essentiel@piaille.fr 2026-03-10 17:25

@ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot I just got my paperback edition in the mailbox today... so exited!

Open ##749071
@m3tti@functional.cafe 2026-03-11 09:20

@ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot i've purchased the book at the beginning of the week and man i'm looking forward to that pice of gold. I love those kind of books about tech. Be detailed but also give you stories about how all happened. I'll eat that book i guess

Open ##749074
@m3tti@functional.cafe 2026-03-11 09:25

@ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot i personally enjoyed also 'lisp hackers' from Vsevolod Dyomkin it was a great read how people use #lisp

Open ##749076