
Production Rules (Read-Eval-Print-λove) - drnewman
https://leanpub.com/readevalprintlove004/read
======
whitten
from the top of the page:

Read-Eval-Print-λove (Read-Eval-Print-Love) is an N-monthly zine of original
content and curation about the Lisp family of programming languages and
little-languages in general.

v004 - Production Rules -- Michael Fogus This installment will deal with
production rules, their purpose and implementation as well as an exploration
into rules-driven OOP, data, and extracting ourselves from the Tarpit. Plus, I
list my 100 favorite Jazz albums.

A dive into the inner working of a small production rules system using the
Clojure programming language.

This article is the first in a series focused on logic programming
implementation ...

So it seems that is a published zine where you buy an e-copy for between $5
and $20 with a cute little sliding bar that tells you the author's cut of the
money you send (basically 80%) Interesting User interface design.

The idea of Production Rules harkens back to the Simon and Newell days of the
General Problem Solver (GPR) using generalized if-then statements to implement
programming, similar to a generalization of an expert system.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _So it seems that is a published zine where you buy an e-copy for between $5
> and $20 with a cute little sliding bar that tells you the author 's cut of
> the money you send (basically 80%) Interesting User interface design._

Yup, 80%. They say that explicitly here:
[https://leanpub.com/authors](https://leanpub.com/authors). The site itself,
LeanPub, is one of the more (if not most) well-known self-publishing outlets,
particularly recognizable for supporting "early access" books. I.e. like video
games, you can pay while the book is still being written, to access its
already made parts and possibly influence its final shape. People sometimes
use it for donations too, by setting the minimum price to $0.

The quality is what you'd expect. On a spectrum between a blogpost and an
O'Reilly book, most what I've seen is around 30% there.

Other books related to Lisp popped up there too. I remember buying three:

\- [https://leanpub.com/lispwebtales](https://leanpub.com/lispwebtales)

\- [https://leanpub.com/lisphackers](https://leanpub.com/lisphackers)

\- [https://leanpub.com/lispweb](https://leanpub.com/lispweb)

(EDIT: no affiliation with LeanPub; just the way you wrote that sentence made
me think you believe parts of this platform are features of the zine, which
they're not.)

~~~
peterarmstrong
(Leanpub co-founder here.)

I like to think that some of our books are between 30% and 110% of what you'd
expect from an O'Reilly book. They don't have things like indexes, but the
advantage is that authors can write in a dialect of Markdown, preview or
publish with one click, and distribute updates to readers automatically.

So, many of our books start as 30% or less of what you'd expect from an
O'Reilly book, and grow to be as much or more than one.

In terms of the "or more" part, this can include being more specialized than
what would be considered marketable.

It can also, however, include being offered as a course: a Leanpub manuscript
written in Markua (one of our two Markdown dialects) can also be used as the
basis for a course.

To learn more about that, the spec is here:
[https://leanpub.com/markua/read#leanpub-auto-creating-a-
cour...](https://leanpub.com/markua/read#leanpub-auto-creating-a-course-or-
mooc-from-a-markua-document)

(And thanks to that bug being pointed out to us, that link should even work
well on phones now :)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thanks for reply!

I realize now I wasn't clear about that "quality" bit - I didn't mean to imply
your publishing has quality issues; it was just a statement about the
_contents_ of books, based on my experience reading them. I don't find this
unexpected or bad either, this comes naturally with lowering barriers to entry
and letting more people become authors. I like your service and I believe
you're doing a very good job.

~~~
peterarmstrong
Thanks! :)

------
setr
Sites totally broken on mobile: links don’t work, and the buy-banner eats up
70% of the page

But scrolling works nicely, and the cover is pretty, and from my little
viewport to the ToC, the content might be interesting too

~~~
peterarmstrong
Sorry about this! We've fixed the mobile read page now, so pages like
[https://leanpub.com/readevalprintlove004/read](https://leanpub.com/readevalprintlove004/read)
will work a lot better on mobile.

That was a pretty terrible oversight on our part; thanks for pointing it
out...

------
panzerklein
Querying data against facts - isn't that a job for Prolog?

~~~
Jtsummers
Yes.

EDIT: More seriously, it's not the case that Prolog is the _only_ language or
mechanism for this. And there can be benefits to the ways other rules systems
work (assumptions they make, search algorithms underlying them, etc.).

~~~
panzerklein
Interesting. I didn't know about other such systems.

