Recent Posts
Learn Common Lisp With Touretzky
I didn’t wake up this year intending to be the guy who reviewed Lisp textbooks, but these are definitely Lovecraftian stranger aeons…
At the apex of my frustration with Land of Lisp, I vented on Mastodon. In response, space-, Lisp-, and Medley-evangelist Paolo Amoroso suggested some well-regarded alternatives. Of them, the option that caught my eye for its considerate and, well, gentle tone, was David Touretzky’s book: COMMON LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation [CLAGISC hereafter].
When some more-experienced Lisp hands called it “too basic,” I was concerned. Having finished the work, I discovered something remarkable: CLAGISC educates beginners, but then – through clever editorial machinery – it bootstraps them into practicing intermediate Lisp programmers. Through a meta-circular process that unites writing, editing, graphic design, and play-testing, it transforms its own readers a second time.
Due to its superior editing and its gentle and practiced and human tone, I recommend starting explorations of Lisp with CLAGISC, a book that — ouroboros-like — seems to have consumed its own tail and unlocked an eternal golden braid in its own reading. Its end is its beginning; its fractal spin into the depths is actually the fractal spin out into the heavens. It is the rung beyond the last rung in Wittgenstein’s ladder.
Let me show you how this remarkable book works.
A Surprisingly Beautiful Inhaler
I don’t remember exactly when I got diagnosed as an asthmatic. Some of my earliest core memories are going to a hospital for pneumonia: trundling into a van in the dark; returning home to Slidell and convalescing while watching “The Wizard of Oz” for the first time, a rubbery “Robbie the Robot” from “Lost in Space” in hand.1 2 A few years later, on the cusp of Junior High, I would learn the diagnosis word “asthma,” start allergy shots, and begin a medicine regime (a super start to socially-awkward years!)
Since then, I’ve had a rescue inhaler prescription. I used the device less in Europe, even less in the Bay, and a tad bit more in NYC. Across the years, the brands and the actuator look-and-feel have changed, but I can say this: never have I seen a more beautiful inhaler than my current generic albuterol sulfate.
The design is clean and considered - it’s like Wes Anderson worked in pharma. It is, to quote the Old Man from A Christmas Story, “indescribably beautiful.“3
Tool Creation and Cognitive Space
I was intrigued by a recent post by Alex Tiniuc about tool creation in software development. In “Unexpected Benefits of Building Your Own Tools”, Tiniuc describes how he’s been making a video game (main task) but that he took a detour to work on a simple tool for editing the inventory of “assets” (game-developer-speak for “stuff in the world”) possible in the game (side task). But once he returned to the main task, he found he’d boosted his productivity in such a way that he wasn’t in the weeds anymore; he was working at a higher level and, freed of drudgery, seeing ways to make the game (main task) better.1
Tiniuc observes that when we develop small tools that save us cognitive burden, we create, in aggregate, space for inspiration and intuition to blossom. I found a fascinating echo in the case of Tiniuc and that of William Oughtred a 16th century Anglican clergyman and mathematician.