Excellent effort, as elegant as the language. Page on top should be card stock. Q&D method is to print all as instructed then take pile to Kinko's. The have both coil binding, folders and saddle style staplers. Run you about 5 bucks. Some thing(sadly out of print) for Mathematica would be more like 35 bucks so think yourself fortunate...
I was about to try and finally learn some lisp but now I am scared... Are there really nearly 1000 symbols? All in the same namespace? I thought you guys were always trashing php for having too many symbols.
Then you could always go for scheme, it's smaller. But it doesn't really matter. You can start with a tutorial, and just work with the core vocabulary, then gradually expand. I've been doing CL almost full-time for a year, and still, every once in a while, I find out that one function I'd defined is exactly the same as a built-in that I didn't know about.
One namespace for the built-in functions is not a problem in practice, it just means that you don't have a de facto categorization of the commands like in Python. This sometimes makes life painful when looking for commands, but no big deal.
I sure wish the hyperspec was better hyperlinked though. The See Also section is abysmal. find is not connected to member: What the hell.
I also find that C-c-d-a in slime is helpful for looking for the right command.
It's not as bad as it sounds, when you consider that that includes not only (the names of) functions and macros, (of which there are many groups of similar/related ones, e.g. car, cdr, cadr, cdar etc. or char<, char>, char= etc.,) but also system constants and variables, and types and classes.
Also there's some functions you use all the time so you'll get to know them quickly (ex: find, remove, push, mapcar, assoc) and others you'll probably never need (ex: tagbody, prog, progv). In short you only have to learn a fraction of those 978 to be able to make something significant.
I use Lisp whenever I can. I think most people who have been initiated into thinking in Lisp would prefer to use it over other languages in most circumstances. Many recent languages have grown to accommodate Lisp thinking in differently branded packages for this reason. It is fair to view Lisp as the ultimate high-level language that will persist as other languages come and go. The main reason is its ability to process itself. That's a key innovation that makes it more than just another programming language. There are programming languages, and then there is Lisp.
