programming musings

I wasn’t aware of The Art of Lisp & Writing, by Richard P. Gabriel, being online. I like this essay so much that it justifies its own entry. As i mentioned in The Joy of REPL, this was written as the foreword to Successful Lisp, a pretty nice book on Common Lisp, but Richard’s thoughts apply to any Lisp and many other programming languages.

While i’m at it, there are many other essays by RPG worth reading, including his classic series Worse is Better, his (and Guy Steele’s) history of The Evolution of Lisp (PDF), or the little jewel Why of Y, for those of you really wanting to understand what recursion is about.

Richard was also one of the designers of CLOS, and has a number of interesting papers on the CLOS specification.

Tags: clos, common lisp, lisp