I love it so much, and seeing your bibliography makes me feel like a kid in a candy store. The confluence of Asian philosophy and computing is delightful.
As somebody who read a couple of the author's books, and also somebody who spent almost a decade studying compilers, I am genuinely curious about the author himself.
These works are something I both understand and would never achieve myself. These are cultural artifacts, like deeply personal poetry, made purely for the process of it. Not practically useful, not state of the art, not research level, but... a personal journey?
If the author is reading this... can you share your vision? Motivation?
Thank you so much for reading my books and describing my work in such
beautiful words! You basically answered your own question! My motivation
is just the creation of something I find beautiful. The vision, to pass
knowledge to those who seek it in the simplest possible way, where
"simple" does not necessarily mean in the tersest form, but in a form
that invites being digested.
I do not usually talk much about "myself". I tried, but with no-one
asking, I find it difficult to say anything.
I just bought ePubs for your Raja Yoga Revisted (I usually study SRF material, but alternatives are good!) and Scheme 9 for Empty Space. Your web site is very nice, I loved the ‘Who am I?’ page. I have been using Lisp languages since 1978 but except for studying Peter Norvig’s Lisp in Python, I have never dropped below the abstraction layer into a Lisp implementation so I am looking forward to that.
+1, long time follower of nmh's work. His books are brief and concise, but carry a peculiar "something", a precision of expression etc that is hard to put into words - but can often be noticed in long-time practicioners of some mental teaching. :)
It is always interesting to spot a person on the interwebs who seems to actually have managed to turn buddhist or some other teachings into real world deeds. Living really modestly (IIRC, he/you also uses modest, underclocked laptops?), publishing for the benefit of many, and doing all this for years and years. Like, there seems to be no "overhead" in this way of living. Hugely inspirational.
I would also point out the "Essays" section on nmh's webpage, especially the ones discussing sensitivity and high IQ: https://t3x.org/#essays
Having purchased several of your books, thanks for your work, nmh!
Turning the Buddhist (or other) teachings into deeds
is not too hard once you have understood who you are,
and, maybe more importantly, who you are not. Figuring
/that/ out can be tough and require a lot of practice.
What people perceive as modest is really an acceptance
or even appreciation of what is. My apartment has not
been renovated in decades, I repair what needs repair and
otherwise leave things to themselves. I wear clothes until they
disintegrate, and my hardware is already old when I
buy it. This is the course of things. Things age and
change and at some point disappear. Why prefer the new
over the old? Why the old over the new? It is just that
things and beings get old on their own, and it is much
more joyful to witness this than trying to resist it.
Many thanks to everybody who is wrote in this thread! Your words mean a lot to me! I will reply to some individual messages. If I don't, please substitute "thank you!" :)
> These are cultural artifacts, like deeply personal poetry, made purely for the process of it. Not practically useful, not state of the art, not research level, but... a personal journey?
I can't speak for the author but this is exactly how I look at the lisp I'm developing. It's a lifetime project. I had some kind of vision depicting how different things could be, and at some point I started trying to make it happen. I want to convince myself I'm not insane for thinking it was possible in the first place.
Purchased the author's `Scheme 9 from Empty Space` book and loved it. Lots of very well-commented and explained code, on how to build a language up from the beginning. So much fun.
Looks awesome. Just ordered a copy. I'm just now picking up Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp again and taking another stab at immersing myself in the world of Lisp. So this is perhaps fortuitous timing.
I love Lisp (I'm an Emacs user and often write in Racket for personal projects) but the one thing I never understood about the Lisp community is the emphasis placed on metacircular evaluators.
I sure find them beautiful and all, but why do they take center stage so often? Beside the aesthetics and instructional value, I don't get the appeal. Also I feel that a bunch of the heavy lifting behind metacircular evaluators is actually done by the Polish notation syntax as well as the actual implementation, and these concepts don't get nearly as much love.
But of course you must close the loop by representing Maxwell's equations electromagnetically.
I know this is a classic analogy, but now you've got me wondering, originally Maxwell wrote a messy pile of equations of scalrs, later someone (Gibbs?) gave them the familiar vector calculus form. Nowadays we have marvellously general and terse form, like (using the differential of the Hodge dual in naturalised units),
d star(F) = J
My question is, when are we going to get some super-compact unified representation of `eval`?
Under “The Intended Audience” (page 10 of the PDF sample on the site), it says that this is not an introduction to LISP and that it would be more enjoyable with some prerequisites.
Where does one — who has no knowledge of these prerequisites or about LISP (except that the latter has been heard in programming circles as something esoteric, extremely powerful, etc.) — start, before reading this book?
When I was a beginner, A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation worked for me. As the title suggests, it gently introduces concepts in a very beginner friendly manner, so even macros are easy enough to grasp by the time you get there. The diagrams and examples are great.
If you prefer hands-on learning, How to Design Programs is pretty good resource for the foundations, with lots of examples and exercises: https://htdp.org
But learning the basics of lisp is more like a side effect, the focus is on program design.
There's ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham. I've never read it and I'm not sure it's the best introduction but thumbing through it I don't see how you can get any more basic than that.
One source of awe people have with the idea of Lisp is how much you can build off of so little. I like pg's Roots of Lisp paper on that https://justine.lol/sectorlisp/jmc.pdf The core thing was the meta-circular evaluator (eval) in the original Lisp paper. You can work through it or try re-implementing it in something else. I like this recent tiny version https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/
Another source of awe is about Lisp being more of a programming system than a language, and Common Lisp was the standardization of a lot of efforts towards that by companies making large and industrial pieces of software like operating systems, word processors, and 3D graphics editors. At the language level, "compile", "compile-file", "disassemble", "trace", "break", "step" are all functions or macros available at runtime. When errors happen, if there's not an explicit handler for it (like an exception handler) then the default behavior isn't to crash but to trigger the built-in debugger. And the stack isn't unwound yet, you can inspect the local variables at every layer. (There's very good introspection in general for everything.) Various restarts will be offered at different parts of the stack -- for example, a value was unknown, so enter it now and continue. Or you can recompile your erroneous function and restart execution at one of the stack frames with the original arguments to try again. Or you can apt-get install some foreign dependency and try reloading it without having to redo any of the effort the program had already made along the way.
Again, all part of the language at runtime, not a suite of separate tools. Implementations may offer things beyond this too, like SBCL's code coverage or profiling features. All the features of the language are designed with this interactivity and redefinability in mind though -- if you redefine a class definition, existing objects will be updated, but you can control that more finely if you need to by first making a new update-instance-for-redefined-class method. (Methods aren't owned by classes, unlike other OOP languages, which I think eliminates a lot of the OOP design problems associated with those other languages.)
I like the book Successful Lisp as a tour of Common Lisp, it's got a suggested reading order in ch 2 for different skill levels: https://dept-info.labri.fr/~strandh/Teaching/MTP/Common/Davi... It's dated in parts as far as tooling goes but if you're mostly interested in reading about some bits rather than actively getting into programming with Lisp that's not so bad. If you do want to get into it, https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ has some resources on getting started with a Lisp implementation and text editor (doesn't have to be emacs).
Thanks. I recently had to reinvent LISP to script my CRDT database.
That was not much work, because I already had the notation (I use RDX, a JSON superset with CRDT types).
Still, I stumbled at the idiosyncratic LISP bracketing. Luckily, RDX allows for different tuple notations. So, I styled it to look less alien to a curly-braced developer. Like this https://github.com/gritzko/go-rdx/blob/main/test/13-getput.j...
For example, print change-dir make-dir; is equivalent to (print (change-dir (make-dir) ) ) in the old money. I wonder if I am reinventing too much here.
Did LISPers try to get rid of the brackets in the past?
There have been many attempts to get rid of sexprs in favor of a “better” syntax. Even John McCarthy, the inventor (discoverer?) of Lisp had plans for an “M-expression” syntax to replace “S-expressions.” It never happened. The secret is that Lispers actually view sexprs as an advantage, not something to be worked around. Once you discover symbolic editing and code manipulation based on sexprs, you’ll never go back to weak line editing. That said, some Lisp dialects (e.g. Clojure and Racket) have embraced other symbols like square and curly brackets to keep the code more terse overall and optically break up longer runs of parentheses.
Probably the best example of a “Lisp without parentheses” is Dylan. Originally, Dylan was developed as a more traditional Lisp with sexprs, but they came up with a non-sexr “surface syntax” before launching it to avoid scaring the public.
Exactly. I also like Clojure’s use of square brackets for vectors and curly braces for maps. It eliminates all the “vector-” and “map-” function calls.
Those are big quality of life improvements. I wish the other lisps would follow suit. I suppose I could just implement them myself with some macros, but having it standard would be sweet.
The Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Report on the Algorithmic Programming Language Scheme (R6RS) specified that square brackets should be completely interchangeable with round brackets, which allows you to write let bindings or cond clauses like so:
(let ([a (get-some-foo 1)]
[b (get-some-foo 2)])
(cond [(> a b) -1]
[(< a b) 1]
[else 0]))
...but I hate that, I'd much prefer if square brackets were only used for vectors, which is why I have reader macros for square brackets -> vectors and curly brackets -> hash tables in my SBCL run commands.
I sometimes wonder if the issue is really the parentheses or the ease of nesting. In LISP it’s natural to write
(f (g (h x))).
Whereas most people are used to.
a = h(x);
b = g(a);
c = f(b);
In C/C++ most functions return error codes, forcing the latter form.
And then there are functional languages allowing:
x -> h -> g -> f
but I think the implicit parameter passing doesn’t sit well with a lot of programmers either.
Interesting comment. I found the lisp/sexpr form instantly understandable. While the others weren't hard to grasp it took a moment to consciously parse them before their meaning was as clear. Perhaps the functional arrow notation is least appreciated because it's seems more abstract or maybe the arrows are just confusing.
More likely than not it's a matter of what a person gets used to. I've enjoyed working in Lisp/Scheme and C, but not so much in primarily functional languages. No doubt programmers have varied histories that explain their preferences.
As you imply, in C one could write nested functions as f (g (h (x))) if examining return values is unnecessary. OTOH in Lisp return values are also often needed, prompting use of (let ...) forms, etc., which can make function nesting unclear. In reality programming languages are all guilty of potential obscurity. We just develop a taste for what flavor of obscurity we prefer to work with.
Has anyone here read his “Practical Compiler Construction”? It’s on of the shorter compiler books Ive seen, seems like it might be a good way to learn a bit more about assembly
I was very curious about this too. I've had my finger hovering over the "buy" button for months but there are next to no reviews on it. I'm wondering how it differs from other, similar works
There are always the sample chapters, and the code from the book is in the public domain. :)
The book is basically a modern and more complete version of the "Small C Handbook" of the 1980's. I goes through all the stages of compilation, including simple optimizations, but keeps complexity to a minimum. So if you just want to learn about compiler writing and see what a complete C compiler look like under the hood, without investing too much into theory, then this is probably one of very few books that will deliver.
Edit: and then Warren Toomey has written "A Compiler Writing Journey" based on PCC, which may shed a bit more light on the book: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/acwj
Can anyone compare this with Queinnec's Lisp in Small Pieces? I was waiting for an English version of the 2nd edition but I guess it's never happening and my French has unfortunately regressed since then.
LISP in Small Pieces discusses very sophisticated techniques, while LISP From Nothing is more about the quirks and implementations of early LISP. Of course you can write a modern LISP based on the things covered in LFN, but if you are planning to write more than a toy, then Queinnec's book is the one to read.
tug2024 wrote:
> Doesn’t lisp extend lambda calculus (abstraction . application)? As a consequence, lisp (abstraction . application . environment)!
Another valid question downvoted into oblivion.
The environment in (lexically scoped) LISP is an implementation detail. Lambda calculus does not need an environment, because variables are substituted on a sheet of paper. So lambda calculus equals lexically scoped LAMBDA in LISP.
Sure, you could view LISP as LC plus some extra functions (that are not easily implemented in LC).
The entire website of the author is worth exploring: https://t3x.org/index.html
I love it so much, and seeing your bibliography makes me feel like a kid in a candy store. The confluence of Asian philosophy and computing is delightful.
To put you in the correct headspace this Saturday morning: https://t3x.org/whoami.html
"A kid in a candy store", I love it! :)
Enjoy your stay!
That is a joy! Thank you.
As somebody who read a couple of the author's books, and also somebody who spent almost a decade studying compilers, I am genuinely curious about the author himself.
These works are something I both understand and would never achieve myself. These are cultural artifacts, like deeply personal poetry, made purely for the process of it. Not practically useful, not state of the art, not research level, but... a personal journey?
If the author is reading this... can you share your vision? Motivation?
Thank you so much for reading my books and describing my work in such beautiful words! You basically answered your own question! My motivation is just the creation of something I find beautiful. The vision, to pass knowledge to those who seek it in the simplest possible way, where "simple" does not necessarily mean in the tersest form, but in a form that invites being digested.
I do not usually talk much about "myself". I tried, but with no-one asking, I find it difficult to say anything.
I just bought ePubs for your Raja Yoga Revisted (I usually study SRF material, but alternatives are good!) and Scheme 9 for Empty Space. Your web site is very nice, I loved the ‘Who am I?’ page. I have been using Lisp languages since 1978 but except for studying Peter Norvig’s Lisp in Python, I have never dropped below the abstraction layer into a Lisp implementation so I am looking forward to that.
EDIT: https://usesthis.com/interviews/nils.m.holm/
I just ordered this book. Looking forward to learning! Thank you for your effort.
I love that your lisp implementations are so portable. I believe one is available for Plan 9.
Thanks! And yes, Scheme 9 from Empty Space should compile on Plan 9! http://t3x.org/s9fes/
> Scheme 9 from Empty Space
As a fan of word plays, that got a genuine chortle out of me. Thank you.
“I have nothing to say and I am saying it”
Cage.
Thanks for An Introduction to Mental Development, I've throughly enjoyed it!
So have I! :)
And thanks for the Cage quote. I enjoyed that, too!
Thank you for your work! I share your feelings.
+1, long time follower of nmh's work. His books are brief and concise, but carry a peculiar "something", a precision of expression etc that is hard to put into words - but can often be noticed in long-time practicioners of some mental teaching. :)
It is always interesting to spot a person on the interwebs who seems to actually have managed to turn buddhist or some other teachings into real world deeds. Living really modestly (IIRC, he/you also uses modest, underclocked laptops?), publishing for the benefit of many, and doing all this for years and years. Like, there seems to be no "overhead" in this way of living. Hugely inspirational.
I would also point out the "Essays" section on nmh's webpage, especially the ones discussing sensitivity and high IQ: https://t3x.org/#essays
Having purchased several of your books, thanks for your work, nmh!
Thank you for your kind description of my work!
Turning the Buddhist (or other) teachings into deeds is not too hard once you have understood who you are, and, maybe more importantly, who you are not. Figuring /that/ out can be tough and require a lot of practice.
What people perceive as modest is really an acceptance or even appreciation of what is. My apartment has not been renovated in decades, I repair what needs repair and otherwise leave things to themselves. I wear clothes until they disintegrate, and my hardware is already old when I buy it. This is the course of things. Things age and change and at some point disappear. Why prefer the new over the old? Why the old over the new? It is just that things and beings get old on their own, and it is much more joyful to witness this than trying to resist it.
Many thanks to everybody who is wrote in this thread! Your words mean a lot to me! I will reply to some individual messages. If I don't, please substitute "thank you!" :)
I second this, would be great if someone did a long form video interview with the author.
Read the author’s “Raja Yoga Revisited”.
> These are cultural artifacts, like deeply personal poetry, made purely for the process of it. Not practically useful, not state of the art, not research level, but... a personal journey?
I can't speak for the author but this is exactly how I look at the lisp I'm developing. It's a lifetime project. I had some kind of vision depicting how different things could be, and at some point I started trying to make it happen. I want to convince myself I'm not insane for thinking it was possible in the first place.
It's good to have a life-time project and watch it evolve over time. Nothing insane about that!
Looking at file church.scm from the provided zip file [1], I see the following functions used to construct lists:
That's 2 extra booleans per list element. While the one for recognizing atoms is probably necessary, the other one for recognizing nil is not: The use of null+car+cdr can usually be avoided by using a matching construct instead like [1] https://t3x.org/lfn/church.zipBut then (ATOM NIL) is neither TRUE nor FALSE.
I forgot to add the atom boolean to the nil representation. I made some changes that hopefully fix that.
Indeed, thanks!
Purchased the author's `Scheme 9 from Empty Space` book and loved it. Lots of very well-commented and explained code, on how to build a language up from the beginning. So much fun.
https://t3x.org/s9book/index.html
Looks awesome. Just ordered a copy. I'm just now picking up Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp again and taking another stab at immersing myself in the world of Lisp. So this is perhaps fortuitous timing.
Often recommended is Paul Graham's "On Lisp", available for free on his website: https://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
I love Lisp (I'm an Emacs user and often write in Racket for personal projects) but the one thing I never understood about the Lisp community is the emphasis placed on metacircular evaluators.
I sure find them beautiful and all, but why do they take center stage so often? Beside the aesthetics and instructional value, I don't get the appeal. Also I feel that a bunch of the heavy lifting behind metacircular evaluators is actually done by the Polish notation syntax as well as the actual implementation, and these concepts don't get nearly as much love.
Any Lisper who can illuminate me?
Long time lisper. It just doesn’t feel right unless your language can compile your language. It’s like wearing someone else’s underwear.
or interpret
Agreed, I hate interpreting other people's underwear.
The metacircular evaluator shows how code is data and data is code.
And in a way it’s like Maxwell’s equations. A simple proof of computation that also somehow implements a very neat language.
But of course you must close the loop by representing Maxwell's equations electromagnetically.
I know this is a classic analogy, but now you've got me wondering, originally Maxwell wrote a messy pile of equations of scalrs, later someone (Gibbs?) gave them the familiar vector calculus form. Nowadays we have marvellously general and terse form, like (using the differential of the Hodge dual in naturalised units),
My question is, when are we going to get some super-compact unified representation of `eval`?>later someone (Gibbs?) gave them the familiar vector calculus form.
It was Oliver Heaviside (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside) that rewrote Maxwell's equations into vector calculus form/notation.
"What else are lists, but alternatives?"
(credit to https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-intervie..., I always get a kick out of that and the follow up https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview).
Related:
Lisp from Nothing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24809293 - Oct 2020 (29 comments)
Lisp from Nothing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24798941 - Oct 2020 (5 comments)
Thanks for resubmitting the posting! I appreciate it! :)
Under “The Intended Audience” (page 10 of the PDF sample on the site), it says that this is not an introduction to LISP and that it would be more enjoyable with some prerequisites.
Where does one — who has no knowledge of these prerequisites or about LISP (except that the latter has been heard in programming circles as something esoteric, extremely powerful, etc.) — start, before reading this book?
When I was a beginner, A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation worked for me. As the title suggests, it gently introduces concepts in a very beginner friendly manner, so even macros are easy enough to grasp by the time you get there. The diagrams and examples are great.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf
If you prefer hands-on learning, How to Design Programs is pretty good resource for the foundations, with lots of examples and exercises: https://htdp.org
But learning the basics of lisp is more like a side effect, the focus is on program design.
There's ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham. I've never read it and I'm not sure it's the best introduction but thumbing through it I don't see how you can get any more basic than that.
One source of awe people have with the idea of Lisp is how much you can build off of so little. I like pg's Roots of Lisp paper on that https://justine.lol/sectorlisp/jmc.pdf The core thing was the meta-circular evaluator (eval) in the original Lisp paper. You can work through it or try re-implementing it in something else. I like this recent tiny version https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/
Another source of awe is about Lisp being more of a programming system than a language, and Common Lisp was the standardization of a lot of efforts towards that by companies making large and industrial pieces of software like operating systems, word processors, and 3D graphics editors. At the language level, "compile", "compile-file", "disassemble", "trace", "break", "step" are all functions or macros available at runtime. When errors happen, if there's not an explicit handler for it (like an exception handler) then the default behavior isn't to crash but to trigger the built-in debugger. And the stack isn't unwound yet, you can inspect the local variables at every layer. (There's very good introspection in general for everything.) Various restarts will be offered at different parts of the stack -- for example, a value was unknown, so enter it now and continue. Or you can recompile your erroneous function and restart execution at one of the stack frames with the original arguments to try again. Or you can apt-get install some foreign dependency and try reloading it without having to redo any of the effort the program had already made along the way.
Again, all part of the language at runtime, not a suite of separate tools. Implementations may offer things beyond this too, like SBCL's code coverage or profiling features. All the features of the language are designed with this interactivity and redefinability in mind though -- if you redefine a class definition, existing objects will be updated, but you can control that more finely if you need to by first making a new update-instance-for-redefined-class method. (Methods aren't owned by classes, unlike other OOP languages, which I think eliminates a lot of the OOP design problems associated with those other languages.)
I like the book Successful Lisp as a tour of Common Lisp, it's got a suggested reading order in ch 2 for different skill levels: https://dept-info.labri.fr/~strandh/Teaching/MTP/Common/Davi... It's dated in parts as far as tooling goes but if you're mostly interested in reading about some bits rather than actively getting into programming with Lisp that's not so bad. If you do want to get into it, https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ has some resources on getting started with a Lisp implementation and text editor (doesn't have to be emacs).
The book looks awesome. However, I find some irony in the presence of a “no AI” badge on the back cover considering Lisp was AI research.
I am well aware of that :)
I read it as "no Gen AI" was used to write this book.
"No AI was harmed in the making of this book."
And no AI has harmed the planet in the making of this book.
Second edition, with a new chapter on lambda calculus.
Thanks. I recently had to reinvent LISP to script my CRDT database. That was not much work, because I already had the notation (I use RDX, a JSON superset with CRDT types). Still, I stumbled at the idiosyncratic LISP bracketing. Luckily, RDX allows for different tuple notations. So, I styled it to look less alien to a curly-braced developer. Like this https://github.com/gritzko/go-rdx/blob/main/test/13-getput.j...
For example, print change-dir make-dir; is equivalent to (print (change-dir (make-dir) ) ) in the old money. I wonder if I am reinventing too much here.
Did LISPers try to get rid of the brackets in the past?
There have been many attempts to get rid of sexprs in favor of a “better” syntax. Even John McCarthy, the inventor (discoverer?) of Lisp had plans for an “M-expression” syntax to replace “S-expressions.” It never happened. The secret is that Lispers actually view sexprs as an advantage, not something to be worked around. Once you discover symbolic editing and code manipulation based on sexprs, you’ll never go back to weak line editing. That said, some Lisp dialects (e.g. Clojure and Racket) have embraced other symbols like square and curly brackets to keep the code more terse overall and optically break up longer runs of parentheses.
Probably the best example of a “Lisp without parentheses” is Dylan. Originally, Dylan was developed as a more traditional Lisp with sexprs, but they came up with a non-sexr “surface syntax” before launching it to avoid scaring the public.
I actually really appreciate Racket's judicious use of square brackets in let expressions. It just makes visual parsing that much easier.
Exactly. I also like Clojure’s use of square brackets for vectors and curly braces for maps. It eliminates all the “vector-” and “map-” function calls.
Those are big quality of life improvements. I wish the other lisps would follow suit. I suppose I could just implement them myself with some macros, but having it standard would be sweet.
The Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Report on the Algorithmic Programming Language Scheme (R6RS) specified that square brackets should be completely interchangeable with round brackets, which allows you to write let bindings or cond clauses like so:
...but I hate that, I'd much prefer if square brackets were only used for vectors, which is why I have reader macros for square brackets -> vectors and curly brackets -> hash tables in my SBCL run commands.Yes, and it has never stuck. Even the great John McCarthy, the very creator of Lisp, couldn't manage it: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression>.
I sometimes wonder if the issue is really the parentheses or the ease of nesting. In LISP it’s natural to write (f (g (h x))). Whereas most people are used to. a = h(x); b = g(a); c = f(b);
In C/C++ most functions return error codes, forcing the latter form.
And then there are functional languages allowing: x -> h -> g -> f but I think the implicit parameter passing doesn’t sit well with a lot of programmers either.
Interesting comment. I found the lisp/sexpr form instantly understandable. While the others weren't hard to grasp it took a moment to consciously parse them before their meaning was as clear. Perhaps the functional arrow notation is least appreciated because it's seems more abstract or maybe the arrows are just confusing.
More likely than not it's a matter of what a person gets used to. I've enjoyed working in Lisp/Scheme and C, but not so much in primarily functional languages. No doubt programmers have varied histories that explain their preferences.
As you imply, in C one could write nested functions as f (g (h (x))) if examining return values is unnecessary. OTOH in Lisp return values are also often needed, prompting use of (let ...) forms, etc., which can make function nesting unclear. In reality programming languages are all guilty of potential obscurity. We just develop a taste for what flavor of obscurity we prefer to work with.
Many times. A google for "sweet expressions lisp" will give you a bunch of implementations and opinions.
Aha, thanks https://dwheeler.com/readable/
I laughed at this one: I have more faith that you could convince the world to use esperanto than [to use] prefix notation. - Paul Prescod
Thanks.
If you don't get an answer here, try to contact the author directly through his website, he is pretty responsive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Dylan
Has anyone here read his “Practical Compiler Construction”? It’s on of the shorter compiler books Ive seen, seems like it might be a good way to learn a bit more about assembly
I was very curious about this too. I've had my finger hovering over the "buy" button for months but there are next to no reviews on it. I'm wondering how it differs from other, similar works
There are always the sample chapters, and the code from the book is in the public domain. :)
The book is basically a modern and more complete version of the "Small C Handbook" of the 1980's. I goes through all the stages of compilation, including simple optimizations, but keeps complexity to a minimum. So if you just want to learn about compiler writing and see what a complete C compiler look like under the hood, without investing too much into theory, then this is probably one of very few books that will deliver.
Edit: and then Warren Toomey has written "A Compiler Writing Journey" based on PCC, which may shed a bit more light on the book: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/acwj
Thx, I’m going to buy it I think!
Did you guys hear Ladybird is gonna be ClojureScript by default /dream
The title "Lisp from nothing"
doesn't seem to fit with:
"INTENDED AUDIENCE This is not an introduction to LISP."
on page 10.
Nothing as in "from scratch", as opposed to Nothing as in "Visual Basic's NULL".
Yes, the book is about the bootstrapping of LISP, both in a historical and practical context. Hence "from nothing".
Damn. I ordered the first edition a few weeks back and now the second edition is out :D
Aww, man. If you haven't yet purchased the 2nd ed, send me an email!
Can anyone compare this with Queinnec's Lisp in Small Pieces? I was waiting for an English version of the 2nd edition but I guess it's never happening and my French has unfortunately regressed since then.
LISP in Small Pieces discusses very sophisticated techniques, while LISP From Nothing is more about the quirks and implementations of early LISP. Of course you can write a modern LISP based on the things covered in LFN, but if you are planning to write more than a toy, then Queinnec's book is the one to read.
"... and the chicks for free "?
I have listened to that song probably 100s of times and always heard "checks," so I just learned something new about that song. Thanks.
Maybe less embarrassing than talking about Rock the Cashbar by The Clash (though that one was corrected the first time I saw the back of the album).
Haha, yes! You are the first one to notice or, at least, to respond.
tug2024 wrote: > Doesn’t lisp extend lambda calculus (abstraction . application)? As a consequence, lisp (abstraction . application . environment)!
Another valid question downvoted into oblivion.
The environment in (lexically scoped) LISP is an implementation detail. Lambda calculus does not need an environment, because variables are substituted on a sheet of paper. So lambda calculus equals lexically scoped LAMBDA in LISP.
Sure, you could view LISP as LC plus some extra functions (that are not easily implemented in LC).
When it will stop ? The minimal languages... To be useful for something language need to have at least minimal standard library.
Or just possibility to do syscalls to do something. What is more important then new syntax and sugar over basic instructions.
I don’t think the book aims at being “useful” in the usual sense of the term. Neither the minimal language it builds does.
(They are probably “useful” in the dissemination of what the real essence of computation can reduce to, in practical terms.)
Not everything needs to be useful in fact: certain things can be just enjoyed in their essence, just looked at and appreciated. A bit like… art?
I am implementing my own Scheme as well. Why? I don’t know, one needs to do things that serve no apparent purpose, sometimes.
Do I need a standard library to learn how to implement a language?
Our objectives might, and most probably will, be different.