Practical Common Lisp

Author(s) : Peter Seibel
ISBN: 1590592395
Paperback : 500 pages
Publication Date : Sep 2004
Publisher: Apress

This book was suggested by Henrik Horneber

Book excerpts:

Common Lisp is the modern descendant of the Lisp language first conceived by John McCarthy in 1956. Lisp circa 1956 was designed for "symbolic data processing" and derived its name from one of the things it was quite good at: LISt Processing. We've come a long way since then: Common Lisp sports as fine an array of modern data types as you can ask for: a condition system that provides a whole level of flexibility missing from the exception systems of languages such as Java, Python, and C++; powerful facilities for doing object-oriented programming; and several language facilities that just don't exist in other programming languages.

The nearest thing Common Lisp has to a motto is the koan-like description, "the programmable programming language." While cryptic, that description gets at the root of the biggest advantage Common Lisp still has over other languages. More than any other language, Common Lisp follows the philosophy that what's good for the language's designer is good for the language's users. Thus, when you're programming in Common Lisp, you almost never find yourself wishing the language supported some feature that would make your program easier to write, because, as you'll see throughout this book, you can just add the feature yourself.

Consequently, a Common Lisp program tends to provide a much clearer mapping between your ideas about how the program works and the code you actually write. Your ideas aren't obscured by boilerplate code and endlessly repeated idioms. This makes your code easier to maintain because you don't have to wade through reams of code every time you need to make a change. Even systemic changes to a program's behavior can often be achieved with relatively small changes to the actual code. This also means you'll develop code more quickly; there's less code to write, and you don't waste time thrashing around trying to find a clean way to express yourself within the limitations of the language.

This book is for you if you're curious about Common Lisp, regardless of whether you're already convinced you want to use it or if you just want to know what all the fuss is about.

If you've learned some Lisp already but have had trouble making the leap from academic exercises to real programs, this book should get you on your way. On the other hand, you don't have to be already convinced that you want to use Lisp to get something out of this book.

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