
 On Lisp: Happy 20th Birthday - brudgers
According to Amazon: <i>On Lisp</i> was published September 9, 1993.
======
gw
Earlier this year, I was working for a small software company whose products
were mainly PHP and Perl programs held together with duct tape. Our manager
was doing some spring cleaning by removing old programming books from our
shelf, shouting the titles out, and tossing them in a trash bag.

After a dozen obsolete books on Windows, Visual Basic, and so on, he shouted
out "On Lisp". I was already using Clojure at home, and I recognized the
author, so I lunged for it. None of the other programmers had even heard of
Lisp, and had no idea why we had the book, so they let me keep it. I wonder
how many other old, crusty software shops have gems like that just collecting
dust.

~~~
vukmir
>"None of the other programmers had even heard of Lisp..."

To the HN crowd, this is almost unbelievable, but it is not the worst I've
heard. This summer, going on a vacation, I sat next to a working programmer
who's knowledge of programming and the programming languages begins and ends
with C#. He had no knowledge of Ruby, Perl, Python, open source, git, ...

~~~
copiga
that may be due to where they learned, I am doing a HND in computer science
and we are learning C# and nothing else...

before i began i knew (well enough to make use of) C, vala and a small amount
of lisp and PHP

~~~
vukmir
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. The guy didn't know that such things such as
open source, git, Ruby, Python, Perl,... even existed. I find it impossible to
browse the web and not to run into them, but it seems to be quite possible.

~~~
copiga
most people on my course are like that. at the start about 90% didnt know what
a programming language is and about 50% didnt know what WYSIWYG stands for...

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bad_alloc
You can download it for free[1], as it went out of print some years ago.

[1]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html)

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eccp
There are Clojure versions of the examples from the book by Stuart Halloway
[1] and Michael Fogus [2]

[1] [http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2008/12/12/on-lisp-
clojure](http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2008/12/12/on-lisp-clojure)

[2] [http://blog.fogus.me/tag/onlisp/](http://blog.fogus.me/tag/onlisp/)

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fvrghl
This book helped me fall in love with Lisp.

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stesch
Am I a bad person for using Common Lisp for a short time (a few years) and
then giving up on it completely?

~~~
wglb
No this does not make you a bad person.

I took the better part of a year to feel quite comfortable with Lisp. A few
years later, I am still learning things.

It does take you in a different direction than all of the most popular
languages. Personally, it has been worth the effort.

~~~
stesch
In 2004 I was comfortable enough to release some open source code in Common
Lisp. Around 2008 I stopped using it.

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pg
Thanks!

~~~
bliti
How has the book aged?

~~~
coolsunglasses
About as well as anything related to Common Lisp. It's abstract enough that
some of the macro patterns are reusable in Clojure, but we don't often use
them in Clojure.

Anybody that wants a deeper understanding of Lisp should read, but with the
understanding that it's not a shake-n-bake recipe book.

The last time I wrote an anaphoric macro (let alone the scope-capturing one),
the Clojure IRC channel had a heart-attack.

~~~
bliti
I read it about ten years ago. Do not remember anything, because I was never
able to find work as a Common Lisp programmer. Would have been fun. I know
that things in the lisp community change very slowly, and wanted to know if
the book was still relevant. Might give it a second go.

Is Clojure "lighter" (for a lack of a better term) than lisp?

~~~
coolsunglasses
Clojure is more pliable, yet more robust.

Easier to learn in some respects, yet deeper if you look for it.

I've found it easier to teach Clojure than I had Common Lisp in the past, yet
Clojure has helped me to grow more as a programmer.

There's very little that you can do in CL, that you cannot in Clojure. That
which you can't is often very limited and unimportant ultimately.

There are many things that are either impossible or hopelessly painful in
Common Lisp that are commonplace in Clojure.

It is shocking how much code I write in Clojure is either:

1\. Stateless

2\. Stateful and multi-threaded, yet thread-safe.

~~~
bliti
May you tell what type of systems do you work with? i.e., Web, server,
enterprise intranet, etc.

~~~
coolsunglasses
Web (frontend and backend), SOA, data warehousing, scale-out.

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stewdio
Looking forward to time tourism. Would be great fun to go back to 1993 and
chat about On Lisp, get in touch with Chris Carter about his upcoming series,
and catch the In Utero tour. (Among other things.)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Sorry to be boringly practical but if you go remember :

winner 1993 world baseball series - Toronto Blue Jays. Now take the winnings
and buy Netscape stock:-)

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epsylon
Happy birthday !

Discussion 2 weeks ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6273692](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6273692)

In the discussion was mentioned this link (thanks @nonrecursive!) with
instructions to print your own copy on lulu :

[http://www.lurklurk.org/onlisp/onlisp.html](http://www.lurklurk.org/onlisp/onlisp.html)

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norvig
Congratulations, PG!

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benjamta
Goodness, that makes me feel old. I remember On Lisp very fondly.

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lispm
Price at Amazon starts at $100 and goes up to $1900.

Insane.

But shows how much a classic it is.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Fascinating - 1900 bucks for a book that has a free PDF download must be a bot
pricing war. Amazed to hear those are still up and running,

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garfee
happy birthday

