How you know when a book predates widespread internet availablilty 2008 May 3 20:57
Posted by diamond in : Random , trackbackWhen the book suggests using GNU Emacs1 and the footnote says:
1Available from Free Software Foundation, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Retro.
The book in question is COMMON LISP: An Interactive Approach, published in 1992. I’ve tried learning lisp before, but the book i tried went about it all wrong, for me at least. Too much of the code snippets was in the to-be-explained-in-much-later-chapters category, which grates after a while. The above book, though old, is spot on in it’s approach. The first (short) chapter is dedicated to how to start the lisp interpreter, how to deal with errors, and how to exit it. The dealing with errors in particular was something that had never been explained in the previous book (Practical Common Lisp), and given that clisp will drop you straight into a debugger when you make a typo, this is highly relevant to those new to lisp like myself.
Lisp truly is an elegant language (and not just because xkcd says so). Once you get past how weird the syntax looks compares to most modern languages, it really starts to grow on you.
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