Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: smcl@sytex.com (Scott McLoughlin)
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
Message-ID: <o0yZuc1w165w@sytex.com>
Sender: bbs@sytex.com
Organization: Sytex Access Ltd.
References: <783293332snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 30 Oct 1994 07:13:47 GMT
Lines: 43

cyber_surfer@wildcard.demon.co.uk (Cyber Surfer) writes:

> CL. A tutorial would have to be very bad for a reference book, even
> a very good one, to be better. CLtL is a _big_ and complex book. I'm
> sure that most people would find it intimidating. I know I did, at
> first, and I was already familiar with "Lisp" and a subset of CL.
> 

Howdy,
        CL is a _big_ and complex language.  I'd think that 
someone who wanted to learn how to use the language _well_
would desire MORE and not LESS.  It'd be nice to have a big
fat book just about optimization, maintainability, numerics,
declarations, the type system, image size, managing data,
debugging, etc. Such a book would be rich in examples of how
various popular implementations behave, etc.  Peter Norvig's
"Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence" has some of these
qualities, but I'd like a book that skipped the AI and 
focused on coding,debugging,maintaining,optimizing,condition
handling,etc.
        Of course, for "C" one will find many whole volumes
on any _one_ of these topics, and fewer but some for
Pascal and Fortran.  One will also find various "the
managers edition" type books for designing programs,
dividing up the labor in a reasonable fashion, estimating
time schedules for a given project (ha, ha), etc. which
makes managers more friendly to these languages.
        A few years ago B. Stroustroup said something
to the effect "If you cannot read 'The C Programming
Language', you shouldn't program in C. Same goes for
my book and C++." I'd say the same goes for Common
Lisp and CLtL2. I personally don't care about freshman
CS majors learning Lisp/Scheme. There's lots of nice
books for them readily available in any good bookstore.
We do need more "industrial strength" books, not just
"Welcome to Lisp", "Welcome to Language Semantics" and
"AI Proof of Concept" literature that now fills the 
shelves (these do tend to be nice books by the way).

=============================================
Scott McLoughlin
Conscious Computing
=============================================
