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This book was an important part in my learning of Lisp, along with Common Lisp the Language 2ed. It did leave me with a few biases that took a while to overcome though, like biases against CLOS and verbose names.

I consider this book to be almost like a forerunner of the style of book that JavaScript: the Good Bits is, in that it is advocating one's use of a language to a particular subset rather being an impartial description of the whole language.



It's funny how I started this way as well, and a decade later my Common Lisp code couldn't be more procedural and CLOS and LOOP heavy.


Same, and I actually learned from this book in a class from this very professor!


And probably the aversion to loop facility…


Well to be fair I already had that aversion, though I will use that on occasion.

Ironically enough I am an aficionado of the Waters series facility [1], which requires one to write Loop definitions for certain constructs (like defining new producing forms), so my efforts to avoid using Loop led to me using it.

I think Loop doesn't deserve the hate it gets. I don't particularly like it, but I don't dislike it that much.

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node347.html


Shameless plug:

I got SERIES to work with parenscript. Way better than expected.




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