Let over Lambda–50 Years of Lisp (2008)

frou_dh

Looks like the well known book has just become free (online or PDF)

heisig

The main novelty here is that the author just made the entire book available to the public for free. I have previously read the printed version, so maybe now is a time for a very brief review. The book is technically fascinating and a worthwhile read, but it is also highly opinionated even by Lisp standards. Then again, it is refreshing in this time and age to see this deeply human and creative side of programming. I wholeheartedly recommend others to read it - and to carefully choose which of the advice to follow and which not :) Thank you so much, Doug Hoyte, for making this book available to all of us!

phoe-krk

The book is wonderful to read and get your mind blown by all the ingenious, clever, and surprising things that are possible using basic building blocks of Common Lisp - so that you know exactly what code you should NOT be writing when doing Lisp for anything serious and involving other programmers. It's very good for realizing the difference between what is possible and what is feasible , since Lisp mastery requires both knowledge of what is possible to do and restraint in the actual use of those possibilities. Clever things require cleverer debugging techniques, and Let Over Lambda is absolutely full of the former.

mark_l_watson

I bought and read Doug’s book years ago, glad to see it surfaced here with the announcement that a PDF and HTML version is available. I have been programming in Common Lisp since the early 1980s, love the language, but I just use the language simply. That said I like the things that Doug, Paul Graham and others write about great Common Lisp techniques.

js8

I read the book years ago, and while I think it's interesting, today I think it's better to learn lambda calculus directly, without the Lisp "gimmick".

Quitschquat

This and On Lisp were mind blowing for me at the time. Checkout the Forth implementation in https://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/guest/chap8.html

noiv

Has anybody experience with LLMs and Lisp? I'd assume they love the uniform syntax and may even spend less tokens. But is there enough code to train?

shawn_w

Doug Hoyte is a man of very strong opinions (most of which are wrong), which makes this book more annoying to read than it could have been.