I was able to finish reading all of “The Genius of Lisp“ by @cdegroot and the whole book was as good as the free preview (chapter 8). I was able to speed-read through the detailed explanations of concepts I already knew, like tail recursion, garbage collection, the Y-combinator, Currying functions, and so on. But there were parts where I slowed down and read carefully, like the section on the Universal Turing Machine, and some of the details of the IBM-704 system architecture. Also the story of how the first Lisp implementation was created when one of McCarthy’s grad students implemented an M-Expression calculator, this was described in slightly more detail than what I recall McCarthy himself explaining in his 1960 paper — that or I had just forgotten those parts of the story.
The tone of this book reminds me a lot of popular physics books like Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” which was aimed more at general audiences than professionals. That said, there is a lot to enjoy about this book for professionals like myself as well. There are many good stories about the principals designers of Lisp throughout. The sections on the commercialization of Lisp for the first AI boom of the 1970s and it’s subsequent “AI winter,” were very interesting to read. And if you are a teacher, you might like how some of the concepts in the book are explained.
And I would definitely recommend this very strongly to 3rd-year high school students, or 1st and 2nd year college students, who are more genuinely curious about how computers work and want to know more than just how to make the next billion dollar app.
The next #LispyGopherClimate show with @screwlisp I look forward to talking about this book some more.
#tech #software #Lisp #ProgrammingLanguages #SchemeLang #Scheme #Clojure #Emacs #EmacsLisp #RetroComputing #LispyGopherClimateShow
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