Paul Graham (1) (1964–)

Paul Graham and his editor(s) are excellent. His prose is light and easy to follow. The only awkward component of the book's organization is that he tends to use a concept one section before explicitly introducing and defining that concept. I'm not sure yet if this is a good or bad thing.

As a learning resource

Among books recommended to potential Lispers, ANSI Common Lisp is typically written off. Graham's style of Lisp is called "non-idiomatic". That's fair, both ANSI Common Lisp and On Lisp show more feature aspects of Common Lisp that lend themselves to functional programming. And as those of you who've read Practical Common Lisp know, Common Lisp (unlike Scheme) was not designed to be a functional programming language. Ultimately ANSI Common Lisp covers the same topics Practical Common Lisp does, if not more. But ANSI Common Lisp is better written, in less space, and with shorter examples.

I'm impressed at Graham's ability to summarize. There is a graphic illustrating symbols as a structure composed of a name, a value, a function, a package, and a property list. Although other resources (books and otherwise) mention symbols as having one or more of these components, his graphic was the first representation that clicked for me. He also provides clarity about packages being namespaces for names (symbols) not objects or functions.

And toward the end of the book, there is a discussion on the "instance" abstraction (relative to the class definitions themselves) being more powerful than plain "objects" that carry around methods themselves. This has been the single most useful discussion on the implementation of object-oriented constructs I've read yet.

Digression on Practical Common Lisp

Practical Common Lisp is often called the best introduction to Common Lisp. After reading both, I'd give Practical Common Lisp second place or call it a tie. The issue with Practical Common Lisp is that it takes too long to get anywhere and the practical chapters themselves are just as much a slog. And for as big as it is, Practical Common Lisp still doesn't include some major (potentially confusing) aspects of "modern" Common Lisp like ASDF, Quicklisp, production deployment strategies, etc.

Even after having read Practical Common Lisp I wasn't really clear how to pull together all the libraries I needed to get anything real done (e.g. scripting against an HTTP API or interacting with a SQL database). This is not to say that Practical Common Lisp is a bad book, it is a good book. But I definitely don't recommend reading it without also reading ANSI Common Lisp. And regardless, there are still a few of those modern concepts neither book covers. show less

It's just a bunch of Paul Graham's superb essays collected into one book. Unfortunately the selection of technical posts is showing its age. I'd give the first half of the book five stars and the latter half three, so decided to settle on four. You probably aren't going to have your toes tickled by the second half if you aren't ROBUSTLY INTO LISP.

Hackers & Painters is a celebration of computer engineering and the people that make it possible, developers. Graham is passionate about the things he writes, and he is passionate about a lot of things - the needs of the modern developer, the wants of future ones, tech entrepreneurship, the design programming languages and the superlative position Lisp holds among them. There is also a Steve Ballmer-like undertone of "developers developers developers" running throughout the text, which is a show more bit too strong at times but inspiring nonetheless. Where the essays fall short are when they attempt to draw analogies between art history and the practice of computer science. There exist beautiful connections there, to which Godel Escher Bach is testament, but none of appear in Hackers & Painters. The connections that do appear seem either forced or too simplistic.

The main takeaways of this book are an ego-boost and some decent rule-of-thumbs for designing computer systems, especially programming languages. This book seems written with developers and entrepreneurs in mind, and those are the two demographics that will enjoy it most.

Favourite essays: What You Can't Say, Mind The Gap, A Plan For Spam show less

I really enjoyed this book, it ended with a lot of technical parts of Lisp but, especially the beginning, it dealt with a lot of arguments/ideas that were treated in a pretty new way. His ideas about startups and wealth in particular I found very interesting. There was also a few funny moments when he was talking about his ideas for spam filtering or server-based websites and I thought, "Huh, isn't that what was always done". I didn't realize he(/his company) were the ones who pioneered show more bayesian spam filtering or server-based websites. It made we want to look at lisp again show less