I felt, like some of the other commenters, that I was close to buying the book, but that the sample on Amazon wasn't helping to support a buying decision.

But thankfully the bibliography is given on the book's Web site in full, so I just checked if the most important paper on the history of early LISP [1] was cited or not. It wasn't, so I'm going to pass on ordering the book's first edition.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/800055.802047

The bibliography contains a typo, namely entry 5 misses an "l" in Allegro.

And a book, which I'd call "an Oldie but Goldie" could be added: John Allen's "Anatomy of Lisp" (1978) which still is an excellent read for those who want to dive deep into Lisp's interna. One might also call it a precursor of SICP, as it covers a number of introductory topics too.

Abstract: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/542865

Great endeavour. Land of lisp is still one of my favourite alternative programming books.

One thing about the sample. Is there a chance to get a glimpse of a random chapter you like a lot? Most of it seems to be foreword/acknowledgement and a bit on "what is lisp" which I suspect most who are attracted might already know.

I will take a look, it looks really interesting. Thanks for the effort. I'm also interested in Lisp.

I think you might like this: 'The evolution of Lisp' by Guy L. Steele and Richard P. Gabriel. https://doi.org/10.1145/234286.1057818

I have some feedbak, nothing major, but I would say that a professional designer could help you improve the book cover. Right now somebody with professional experience in graphic design --or a good eye for design-- can probably see details in it that could be improved. It's a pity if you have worked on this for five years, not to present it in the best possible way.

People requested more sample material than Amazon provides, and that's a perfectly understandable request. Chapter 8, about Scheme, it is. https://berksoft.ca/gol/genius-of-lisp-chapter-8.pdf is where you can read it.

Technical history or "internal history" is great. Regular historians writing "external history" of computing tend to focus on certain topics, such as business and economic issues, politics, personalities, or occasionally social impact, while omitting the details of the technology itself - which are often of great interest to practitioners, and which help us understand why things happen to work the way they do.

Of course people who experienced things firsthand often have interesting personal as well as technical insight. CHM's oral histories often provide a combination of both. I also always enjoy:

https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html

Ok I looked at the bibliography. Best I can say is that this book might be ok for a cross-section of Lisp history but I'd like to see something much more thorough, especially regarding early Lisp, and with more of a PLT perspective. Why all those citations of Gödel but nothing(?) about typed lambda calculus or the Kleene-Rosser paradox (that Church's untyped lambda calculus is logically inconsistent)? Do you have anything about Lisp 2? About significant Lisp applications like Macsyma, that drove the language's development?

It would be awesome to have a comprehensive Lisp history bibliography perhaps built around user contributions, something like Richard Jones's garbage collection bibliography https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gcbib/ .

Thank you, looks great!

Have you seen Behind the Parentheses, by Mark Jones Lorenzo? It goes into quite a lot of technical details about how things like eval/apply were implemented for example, and the larger academic and business contexts eg FORTRAN and earlier language development.

I’m a Lisp newbie (and mostly here for the Emacs Lisp) so a fair amount was beyond me, but I still found it quite readable and interesting.

I always buy every Lisp related book I see. I bought this book on Kobo as an eBook. So far, I have spent less than an hour looking through a few sections; fun stuff! I like the wide variety of code snippets mixed with background and history.

I will revisit our discussion here in a day or two after I finish reading this book.

I skimmed the index but… no Clojure? My impression is that it is by far the most used current Lisp. This said, I’d love to read the book - definitely interesting.

Great work. I've put it on my to read list for this year. I currently use Haskell and OCaml/ReScript (with Emacs!), but I always enjoy reading Lisp books and imagine my self building systems in Lisp and exploring code in the REPL. Could you talk about some of your experiences of building software in Lisp?

Chapter 8 sample pdf has a typo(?) in the first paragraph. Carl Hewitt's last name is spelled both Hewitt and "Hewitz", maybe even in the same sentence.

Using an accumulation parameter with tail recursion was per Wikipedia introduced in one of the LTU papers, sometime before Scheme. So the description in the chapter is at best imprecise. But, I would want to look further back historically to see whether any Algol compilers used the technique.

Overall the book looks readable as an intro to Lisp and Lisp implementation, but in a history book I'd like to see more precision and depth, careful citations, etc.

Sounds very cool. I've dabbled with Lisp on and off since the mid-80's, starting with a text adventure in LISP-80 on a Kaypro 4, and though I've never written a serious project in Lisp I've learned a great deal from it. (Wrote a lot of TCL code once upon a time; I've always thought of TCL as a Lisp in which you do a lot of things backwards.)

Positive feedback: really nice that this is available in Rakuten Kobo (as a Kobo user).

This is amazing. I’m tempted to read it backwards just to see the Lisp I know get more and more alien, until we reach the Benjamin Button stage of m-expressions.

Great book, I will definitely buy it, thanks for your work! The history is very important, as you’ve said in your blog post, but companies and universities don’t care much about such things unfortunately. I see there is a chapter on Clojure, so just wondering if you had the chance to interview Rich Hickey for the book?

Cees: typo in chapter 8. "specifically on recursrive".

Always loved actors, but unfortunately scheme didn't champion them.

what's the print like on amazon ones (.de)? I ordered two books once from lulu and woved never to do that again. Print was unreadable, and I'm not _that_ picky. They blamed it on the authors prep and offered a refund though. I was so mad, and still am that it turned me away from them completely though, unless someone tells me they worked at least some QA in their process.

Having some personal memories about John McCarthy included in the book is amazing.

This is a nice and unexpected release, thanks for writing it. Getting a RPG endorsement is great. I just finished reading his foreword and skimming the table of contents and bibliography from the preview. I'd have liked to see a sample of a middle chapter to really see how technical and deep it gets (e.g. Land of Lisp gives its chapter 8 as a sample which I think is very representative for that book). But I plan to get this book regardless -- just not right now.

The back blurb hints that expert systems might be mentioned, but how much? No one ever seems to go much into their implementation or usage.[0] It also mentions writing some JS, which I guess is part of chapter 5, I wonder if that was a publisher request. (My favorite take on that subject in recent years is https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp)

Would it be fair to say this is mainly a history told through the lens of AI and PL research?

Amusingly I think part of me is already setting myself up for some disappointment -- it seems too short with too few references! But it's good to have a Lisp history book like this looks to be and I'm sure I'll learn things from it, and the promise of more RPG writings inside is enticing. Besides, any complete telling would take multiple books. (There's so much of historical interest locked up in proprietary applications and companies with their own histories, and so many papers published, there's also so much that can be dug through in the standardization mailing list (and other lists, like emacs) archives[1], the SAIL archives[2], the Xerox PARC archives[3], the CMU archives[4], and the many undigitized things sitting in boxes at the computer history museum...[5])

[0] Norvig's PAIP gives a small taste, one of the files: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/mycin-r.l... And a book about a particular system, MYCIN: https://www.shortliffe.net/Buchanan-Shortliffe-1984/MYCIN%20... And a short video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a65uwr_O7mM

[1] http://ml.cddddr.org/ and http://cl-su-ai.lisp.se/

[2] https://www.saildart.org/

[3] The url I had before is down... I made a local copy but https://archive.org/details/2014.01.ftp.parc.xerox.com might be the same content

[4] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/...

[5] Even in the earliest Lisp reports like https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42766480_Artificial... there are interesting things mentioned like a two-move checkmate program or "Other projects on which work continues include the Advice Taker, visual pattern recognition, and an artificial hand." Multiple times I've tried to track down those sorts of things mentioned in really old papers only to hit dead-ends on so many of them. Sometimes things were embellished, or were abandoned, or were just lost to time, and sometimes there's an undigitized box at the museum that might contain printouts etc. (There might be MYCIN source code, even.)

It's Cees de Groot! Or "Carpe Grootem" as my brain has called him for years. I remember his contributions to the Squeak community from back in the day.

"arguably the most powerful programming language in the history of computing"

That can be said about quite a few languages, Forth included. The most powerful != easy to use and/or comprehend.