Today is the day. I’m finally “sorta happy enough to pull the trigger” on publishing the book I’ve been working on for a very long time. It’s a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for “tech-adjacent” and “tech-interested” people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy in 1958 and today still going strong (to the extent that many people see it as the most powerful programming language in existence).
And this is a time for shameless self promotion, even if you don’t plan on buying the book, please repost :-). Self-publishing is self-marketing, so there we go.
If you do buy and read it, please let me know how you liked it!
The book landing page, https://berksoft.ca/gol, has links to all outlets where you can buy the book,
Sorry, I had to. Congrats on finally publishing your book. What can LISP be used for in 2026? I am completely unfamiliar.
Emacs! Guix! Fennel! Guile!
I make automation tools at work with Racket.
It’s running on scheme, and there is an editor provided with it.
It’s very useful and it’s quick to prototype algos or just doing simle checks because of the REPL.
It’s obligatory to know if you’re a programmer IMO, it opens your mind to different ways of thinking, which is unvaluable.Thanks! Clojure is a great example of a modern Lisp. Common Lisp is the Swiss army knife of programming and used everywhere you care to look, that is if you look hard ;)
The Spritely Institute is making some cool tech using Guile scheme.
It’s a general purpose programming language, assuming Common Lisp.
There are many variants though and you’ll find some for very specific situations too. The beauty is that it can easily break out of the comfort zone it was made for, so elisp (from the Emacs editor) allows you to do all sorts of other stuff such as browsing the web or handling your mails.
When you get comfortable with the strange naming, lisps can become a safe and fun place to play. Many variants have all sorts of escape hatches when you’re getting yourself in trouble which makes a bunch of plot-twist requirements changes very feasible to tackle.
Anyhow, we use Common Lisp for some web services which see much reuse across apps.
Oh cool sounds interesting will have to buy a copy!
Yes you do! ;-)
I feel like LISP was less created than it was discovered. Almost everyone who fools around with languages will accidentally implement their own version of LISP eventually, and usually very early in their exploration.
You’re probably not wrong, but there’s a difference between stumbling upon it in 2026 and pulling that off in 1958 :-)
… paper tape?
Does it also cover the relationship with scheme? I am mainly interested in the “foundations of computation” aspect of building an executable from minimal well-defined building blocks, so Scheme has been my main interest.
Scheme has a chapter, after all it’s just Lisp. I think - I hope - that some pretty foundational stuff is treated throughout the book.
