Posts tagged "common_lisp,":

The Genius of Lisp

I have just read the book The Genius of Lisp by Cees de Groot. It was a very interesting read. The book tells the history of the Lisp programming language from 1958 to today and also how Lisp, as one of the earliest high level programming languages, has influenced other programming languages over the years. It also goes into the technical details of how Lisp dialects were implemented and the differences between them. And it explains the mathematical groundwork by Alonso Church and Alan Turing for the Lambda calculus, and how John McCarthy used it to build his language.

The technical details are well explained and as easy to follow as they possibly might be. There is example code in IBM 704 Assembly with explanations, practical implementation examples in JavaScript that is easy for present-day programmers to follow, explanations in pseudocode and of course lots of code examples in various Lisp dialects. The early chapters on the mathematical underpinnings of lambda calculus and the foundational work for Lisp and its practical implementation gave me a proper understanding of it even if my mathematical knowledge is very limited.

For me personally, I felt that after reading the book, I now have a better understanding of the different dialects of Lisp, who created them and for what purpose. I knew about some of the dialects and some of their traits, but I learned a lot more about them. For instance, I did not know that Common Lisp is a thoroughly object oriented language and this surprised me.

Although I knew about the previous AI hype with "expert systems" and the AI winter that coincided with the economic downturn in the late 1980s, the book enlightened me with more details and more about its consequences for the AI language Lisp. We are fast heading into a new AI winter now since the LLM providers have unsustainable business models, but I think the consequences for Python will be less dire since its growth in popularity started long before the present LLM craze and it is less closely tied to AI research than Lisp was. (I bet on Python when I studied at the only Norwegian University or College that taught it instead of Java as their first language and since then, its popularity has only grown, from at that time being less used than Java and C#, but now being the second most used language after JavaScript/TypeScript according to Stack Overflow Survey.)

Reading The Genius of Lisp has strengthened my belief in Lisp as a brilliant programming language worth exploring further. It is not on the top 20 list of programming languages now, but it is powerful and elegant with its homoiconic s-expressions for both code and data. Learning more about the different dialects through the book also further convinced me of my previously somewhat uninformed hunch that Clojure and Scheme are Lisps I should look into further. (I am already a Guix user thanks to David Wilson's brilliant SystemCrafter videos, but I haven't had the time to delve deeper into Scheme.) My first meeting with Lisp was in Emacs, and I will continue to play with Emacs Lisp as well.

All in all, it was a good read and I highly recommend this book to people interested in programming, computer history and the mathematical underpinnings of functional programming, the Lambda calculus. Some previous knowledge of JavaScript is useful for understanding the implementation of Lisp functions in the early chapters.