Mastodawn

Pelle S Christensen Feb 20

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,

Kees Kremer Feb 17

@cdegroot Ik heb er eentje besteld. Ben benieuwd!

lispwizard Feb 18

@cdegroot Just ordered it, should arrive on Monday.

Kapitän Clownfeuer Feb 18

That looks excellent! BTW the link has an extra comma which might need fixing 😉

NormanDunbar Feb 18

@cdegroot Good luck with the book. Cheers.

Paolo Amoroso Feb 18

@cdegroot A great angle for telling the history of Lisp.

Is the ebook DRM-free?

David Gerard Feb 18

@amoroso @cdegroot says so on the page!

Paolo Amoroso Feb 18

@davidgerard Doh, my eyes probably saw it but my brain missed.

@amoroso @davidgerard @cdegroot it says so for shopify and kobo. does it apply to lulu (the recommended option) as well?

Paolo Amoroso Feb 18

@pesco I'm wondering about the ebook at Lulu too. According to Wikipedia Lulu phased out DRM long ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulu.com#Digital_Rights_Management_(DRM)

@davidgerard @cdegroot

Lulu.com - Wikipedia

@amoroso @davidgerard @cdegroot yeah, might be a matter of course among those familiar. but i've been burned before. ;)

Paolo Amoroso Feb 18

@pesco Right, it would be better to know in advance.

@davidgerard @cdegroot

@amoroso @pesco @davidgerard @cdegroot I’ve just bought the Lulu epub edition. If there are any specific DRM checks you’d like me to try please let me know. (All I’ve done so far is use sendtokindle.)

Paolo Amoroso Feb 19

@OpinionatedGeek Can you open the ebook with a desktop reader on Linux or other operating systems?

@pesco @davidgerard @cdegroot

@amoroso @pesco @davidgerard @cdegroot Sure. On my fairly vanilla 'Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)' installation, I double-clicked and it opened in Atril (v1.26.2). It opened just fine and is quite readable - I've attached a screenshot for you showing some of the more complicated formulae.

I didn't make any edits to the epub - this is the same file as it was downloaded from Lulu. It seems just fine!

(There's a minor problem with the navigation on the left but it may not be specific to this epub.)

Paolo Amoroso Feb 19

@OpinionatedGeek Thanks.

@OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard @cdegroot i have bought the lulu epub and can confirm it is drm-free as expected. :3

i did run into an issue with missing images. calibre said a bunch of png files were missing, and indeed running unzip -l on the epub file does not show them...

Cees de Groot Feb 21

@pesco @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard I cannot begin to say how much I hate epub - as a format, certainly for technical books, the inconsistencies in standard implementations, and certainly the tooling around it.

I'll fix it tomorrow. Not sure what happened - this did happen on an early version of the epub build (using latex4ht and associated tools, if you want details), and i fixed it and did multiple checks before uploading. Somewhere an old version must have snuck into an upload. My apologies.

David Gerard Feb 21

@cdegroot @pesco @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso epub is the *worst*. i have tended to just bodge my epubs until they pass epubcheck. even then i get bug reports about ebook readers that do weird things with the file.

epub: a format that means books need patch releases.

Cees de Groot Feb 21

@davidgerard @pesco @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso On the upside, we _can_ do patch releases for it.

I'm "blessed" with truly bad myopia, so I can put a PDF on my e-reader and press the thing against my nose and have a nice page in full view :-). I stopped buying epubs for tech books, PDF works much better (and if I don't want to look silly, I have a Boox large-format reader). But the industry, and readers, expect it, alas.

@cdegroot
thanks, please don't sweat it.

i guess though that epub is the only practical alternative as far as reflowable ebook formats go? purely OOI, do you have a preference for some other format, albeit not practical?

/cc @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard

Paolo Amoroso Feb 21

@pesco Indeed, for all its flaws reflowable text is the killer feature of ePub. I guess Mobi and derivatives aren't too different.

@cdegroot @OpinionatedGeek

David Gerard Feb 21

@amoroso @pesco @cdegroot @OpinionatedGeek epub is the worst, but all the others are even more worse

Cees de Groot Feb 21

@pesco @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard My preference is PDF. Well, probably DVI but that's dead ;-). I bought a Boox color specifically to be able to read tech books, reflow is nice for pure prose, but it breaks down when you start caring about page layout.

(and yes, I know there are accessibility advantages, people with dyslexia can use their preferred fonts, etc; I'll do my darnest best to make the epub acceptable for those reasons, but I'll never call it "nice" ;-))

@cdegroot
i get where you're coming from. i have a thing or two for exacting layout and typography etc. ;)

a large-format reader might not be a bad idea to get, but for the moment i have a 2nd gen kindle oasis which matches "reading PDFs works" but not "PDF is a good format for it".

/cc @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard

Cees de Groot Feb 22

@pesco @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard I'm reasonably happy with my Boox. I mean, e-ink colors aren't there yet, but it is very readable and gives more of the battery life advantages of an e-reader (versus, say, a 10-11" tablet which is awesome for PDFs as long as you're close to a charging point :-))

Cees de Groot Feb 19

@amoroso Yes. DRM is stupid and I won't have anything to do with it.

I'm also now selling a (DRM-free) PDF (see the book site, berksoft.ca/gol, for a link), I'm not a big fan of technical books in epub and this is, I think, a much better reading experience.

Paolo Amoroso Feb 19

@cdegroot That's great, thanks.

⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️Feb 18

@cdegroot nice, affordable amd DRM free. Wish listed.

cyclical_obsessive Feb 18

@cdegroot
“Those who cannot remember the past are destined to repeat it”

I’m not sure we should enshrine LISP into Claude Code, even though I once wrote LISP that flew in a cruise missile, and several “expert systems” for critical applications, it seems likely the “AI”s might choose LISP to enable the singularity.

Emacs and LISP - Live it, love it, remember it!

Jyrgen N Feb 20

@cyclical_obsessive @cdegroot Finally someone who spells '"AI"' correctly. In this context, I mean.

The ol' tealeg 🐡Feb 18

@cdegroot fabulous - ordered a physical copy from Lulu. Congratulations. I'm looking forward to reading it!

The ol' tealeg 🐡Feb 18

@cdegroot quotable already, from chapter 8: "Scheme is like a scalpel, and Racket hones that scalpel to a precise tool for language research, Scheme's original focus." #Racketlang

Armin Hanisch Feb 18

@cdegroot Congrats! Just ordered a physical copy. 👍🏼

Szymon Bęczkowski Feb 18

@cdegroot I love technical history books! Purchased a copy.

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

Weekend Editor Feb 18

@Roundtrip @cdegroot

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

RooneyMcNibNug Feb 18

@cdegroot this looks awesome and lisp has piqued my interest for some time now without having "jumped in" too much - going yo grab a copy of this, thanks!

Cees de Groot Feb 19

@rooneymcnibnug it sounds you're the sweet spot of my target audience. Let me know how you like it!

PastaThief Feb 19

@cdegroot OOOO, that sounds interesting! I go buy now!

AstroHyde Feb 19

@cdegroot this is excellent! I'm so excited for this, it looks awesome!

Northerly Goose Feb 19

@cdegroot The Kobo EPUB version makes it very difficult to see the formulas in the first few chapter. It's very blurry. The following images is a X2 magnification.

Cees de Groot Feb 19

@NortherlyGoose strange. What version are you using? I've tested on my laptop and on my Libra and things looked fine there.

Northerly Goose Feb 19

@cdegroot I purchased it directly from KOBO and this is on the KOBO Libra 2. Publisher date is 2/1/26. Kobo software version 4.44.23552 (11/13/25).

Can you try downloading from KOBO to check?

Thank you!

Cees de Groot Feb 21

@NortherlyGoose Yes, I'll do that tomorrow (planning to push out an update to the epubs anyway).

Northerly Goose Feb 21

@cdegroot Thank you for looking into this. Also, why is Chapter 1 before Part 1? I normally see Parts then Chapters within Parts.

Thank you for writing this book.

Cees de Groot Feb 21

@NortherlyGoose I felt it was an introductory chapter, so kept it before Part I where it really didn't fit.

Cees de Groot Feb 22

@NortherlyGoose an update is live on Kobo. I tested both on my Sage (I have a Sage, not a Libra) and on screen, the formulas seem to render fine (I've opted not to risk using MathML because I am not sure how wide support for that is, so as far as I can see they are SVGs, not much I can do w.r.t. rendering quality there).

New ebook revision has a revision identifier ("first revision") on the copyright page.

Northerly Goose Feb 22

@cdegroot I removed and downloaded the book from my Kobo reader but it appears to be the same book (I can't find the phrase "first revision" in the contents). Maybe it hasn't spread to all the servers yet. I'll wait 48 hours and try again.

Cees de Groot Feb 24

@NortherlyGoose yeah, one drawback of indirect sales channels is that all I can do is upload a new revision and then wait for the distributor confirmation "it is done!". I'll check today on a "not me" account to see whether things have propagated, if not, I'll have to ping Kobo support.

Cees de Groot Feb 24

@NortherlyGoose So... shockingly, Kobo does not allow updates to ebooks. It can, on request, push a replacement ebook but that also wipes bookmarks and notes for everybody. That's pretty bad, so I think I'll have to pull Kobo as a channel and see how I can reach people to receive updates from me directly. More to follow.

Northerly Goose Feb 25

@cdegroot where do I report typos?

Cees de Groot Feb 25

@NortherlyGoose PM me and I'll add them to the errata page.

Northerly Goose Feb 25

@cdegroot these missing images are also absent on my KOBO Libre 2.

Cees de Groot Feb 25

@NortherlyGoose known issue, I asked Kobo to push out a corrected version.

Northerly Goose Feb 19

@cdegroot I downloaded the epub from KOBO and it's clear on my mac.

@cdegroot just ordered! Congrats on the launch 💜

Ramin Honary Feb 19

New book: “The Genius of Lisp” by Cees de Groot

Looks like a fascinating read! They have provided chapter 8 as a PDF file downloadable gratis as a sneak-peek into the rest of the book, guess what it’s about:

Chapter 8: Sussman and Steel make Scheme

Awesome! I can’t wait to read that chapter, and then the rest of the book!

Details on the book homepage: https://berksoft.ca/gol/

#tech #software #Lisp #Scheme #SchemeLang #R7RS

RE: https://mstdn.ca/@cdegroot/116086771614712320

Slash909uk Feb 24

@ramin_hal9001 @cdegroot ping! Thanks for the PDF option 👍 I figured it was about time I actually tried to understand the context for LISP, not merely the syntax 😊

Francesco P Lovergine

@cdegroot
Just bought from Lulu.