Mastodawn

Well, today is the day. I'm finally "sorta happy enough to pull the trigger" on publishing the book I've been working on for a very long time. It's a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for "tech-adjacent" and "tech-interested" people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy in 1958 and today still going strong (to the extent that many people see it as the most powerful programming language in existence).

And this is a time for shameless self promotion, even if you don't plan on buying the book, please repost :-). Self-publishing is self-marketing, so there we go.

If you do buy and read it, please let me know how you liked it!

The book landing page, https://berksoft.ca/gol, has links to all outlets where you can buy the book,

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Greg Lloyd Feb 18

@cdegroot
Congratulations and thanks! I’m enjoying the epub edition from Lulu:

“People writing Lisp code to do old-style AI are engaged in a creative act of discovery, an attempt to understand… To discover requires a different sort of language, and it requires a different approach, captured well by the writer Joan Didion:

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.
–Joan Didion, “Why I Write”

Richard P. Gabriel
Foreword

This is much the same as the way Michel de Montaigne wrote his famous essays in 16th century France: to try out his thoughts, from the French word essayer, "to try".

Thus was born the literary form of the essay, much to the chagrin of secondary school students everywhere.

But he was the ur-blogger, and is one of my heroes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne - Wikipedia