Dear God man, please do! I'm into the start of chapter 3 and have suddenly discovered that in fact lisp is not obscure or hard or anything like I was told years ago in high school.

I mean, my introduction to lisp was something to do with concat but it was so divorced from reality that I literally found an early book on C programming and semi-self taught myself it, then found a book called C Pointers and Dynamic Memory Management that literally changed my life.

I have a feeling if I'd read this book I'd have actually done something awesome by now. Frankly, this book might allow me to do something that I've been itching to do for months now.

I can't really express my appreciation enough... but I'll try right now: thank you! A million times over, thank you!

Edit: so Arc - is that like a Webserver based on lisp?

Lisp is a fantastic language and well worth learning.

But these days I pick a language with strong static types every time if I have the choice. I know you can use them with Lisp too to some extent but it's not the same as a language built from the ground up around types.

Totally. I had been thinking about writing a Haskell book but it seems that space is maybe well covered lately.

Arc was Paul Graham's take on a modern Lisp. There are some cool essays on it, but I don't think the software itself ever moved much past alpha stage.

It's the language in which Hacker News is implemented and currently developed.

Doesn't HN use a proprietary fork of Arc?

I've never been entirely certain what the relationship is between YCombinator and the Arc community, if any, but one experimental and partially black-boxed forum doesn't signal a mature language, just one adequate to a particular task.

What else have people done in Arc?

Arc has served as material for a lot of speculative blogposts and helped create buzz for the lisp community.

Being a Lisp, I'm not exactly sure what would constitute a proprietary fork. Furthering my uncertainty is that it [Anarki] is built on Racket and that kinda makes it hard to say one implementation is forked from another.

Anyway, I didn't intend to claim that Arc was a mature language.

Yeah, I just did a quick bit of reading. Ironically, I think I might be groking lisp because it appears ldap filters are lisp expressions, which I've used quite a few times at work...

Hi fellow monkey lisper (or senpai should I say).

What topic are you into these days ? Or maybe you were planning for a sequel to PCL ? in both case really eager to see the resulting book(s).

Well, these days I'm working at Twitter on our abuse problem. So that keeps me pretty busy. I did write another book, Coders at Work, a book of interviews with notable programmers.

I kind of suspect that if I write another book (as I hope to) that I'll continue along the trajectory from pure technical (PCL) to semi-technical (Coders) to something that might reach an even more general audience.

Maybe a Clojure version with similar approach ?

How useful would that really be? PCL has Peter's take on Lisp, and the Joy of Clojure occupies a similar niche if you just want to learn specifically-Clojure.

At one point he mentioned writing a book to the effect of Statistics for Programmers, which sounds intriguing to me. AFAIK it hasn't happened yet, though.

> Statistics for Programmers

Why intriguing? The most general family of distributions can only be expressed with a programming language, so there are certainly many connections between both fields.

Incidentally, that's one of my major complaints about Lisp these days. Lisp-Stat started dying in the early 2000s and completely faded away long ago. I read PCL when it was published a decade ago and I fondly remember how enthusiastic I became about Lisp.

I have used Clojure extensively, but the ecosystem for doing math and statistics is quite reduced. The same applies to CL and Scheme. I wish I could use one Lisp for most tasks.

> > At one point he mentioned writing a book to the effect of Statistics for Programmers, which sounds intriguing to me.

> Why intriguing? The most general family of distributions can only be expressed with a programming language, so there are certainly many connections between both fields.

That seems to be an argument for why it is intriguing. Were you perhaps arguing that it wasn't surprising?

R is about as close as it gets (it is quite lispy underneath all the C-like syntax).

Julia and Wolfram as well.

I was thinking about something completely new. I know one can easily (more or less) follow along PCL and do the solutions in Clojure. I just think that Clojure space needs a book like this, with emphasis on practical. I like the practical section in PCL book at the end, where author builds useful little apps and guides you through the thought process. I know about Joy Of Clojure, great book, but it doesn't contain enough toy projects. I think the goal of the book is to help you start thinking functionaly.

I'm working on a book covering parallel and concurrent programming in Clojure, with the style of building abstractions before actually using them. On the topic of Joy of Clojure, as far as I could tell, the book is not meant to be an introduction to the language, rather meant to be read once already familiar. It's helped me internalize concepts I'd picked up through usage.

Sounds interesting. Where do you plan to release your book ?

> I know one can easily (more or less) follow along PCL and do the solutions in Clojure.

Maybe for the first chapter or two, certainly not most of the book. They're very fundamentally different languages.

Maybe you could warm up by releasing a new, updated edition of Practical Common Lisp? ;)

Practical Uncommon Lisp

Or Practical NonLisp, or Nonpractical Common Lisp.

These imply either inconsistency or impracticality of Lisp, quite an offense ;)