> Let Over Lambda is not about tearing people down or disrespecting people’s work. It is about why I love lisp. - Doug Hoyte (author of let over lambda)
how is it? That’s kind of an exciting description
personally, i don’t care for macros which is what this book goes over.
i skimmed over the text book sections on the website and, i think the book is not that great.
(currently, sheepishly trying to get this emacs-lisp macro I wrote to not be stupid…)
macros have good use cases but he just presents strange hacks in them.
doesn’t even bother going over type systems.
well, actually he does go over an edsl for using units with time but it’s a really poor example.
yeah, though “pushing the boundaries” kinda implies that, right? Not saying that the book can’t use that phrase properly and also be bad, but when I say stuff like that I mean > here’s some stuff you should know is possible if you really want to get into it, but this is definitely not advice for what to do in production
according to the author this is meant to be production quality code and, that’s why it seems strange.
> Mastering macros is the final step to graduating from an intermediate lisp programmer to a lisp professional.
I do think some of the trouble in that book is because of CL’s procedural macros. Matching + hygiene makes a number of things it does easier to follow, so you can focus on the ideas
Also i think the intro could use some updates about the state of macro research, and it makes some sweeping claims about lisp that seem grandiose rather than grounded
> Because lisp procedures are not mathematical functions, lisp is not a functional language. There are a lot of funny passages from this book.
this is the worst book ive ever seen on the topic of lisp.
and the real insight that this book provides is that this code and this style of engineering is paradigmatic in production quality code using lisp.
the style doug presents isn’t that dissimilar to how emacs looks like inside. in fact, racket also has some of these quirks inside it’s implementation.