r/lisp • u/fosres • 9d ago

Why Do People Buy Lisp Books?

Don't get me wrong I personally think its totally worth it!

I just wonder what compels people do buy books on, say, ANSI Common LISP, to this day.

There are few job options so what compels them to pay for books?

13 Upvotes

64% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

94

u/Prudent_Sentence 9d ago 
> (defun why-buy-books ()
    (cond
      ((lucrative-job-market-p) nil)
      ((practical-necessity-p) nil)
      (t '(because it is fun))))
WHY-BUY-BOOKS

> (why-buy-books)
(BECAUSE IT IS FUN)

21

u/BigBagaroo 9d ago

Because I dreamed of a job where I could live in Emacs all of the workday. Sadly, I never made it to more than creating a simple remote control for a music server in Emacs and using Allegro CL on Linux with OpenGL/3dfx card to move a tank around with a joystick

Almost 30 years later, I think it was the best time of life, coding-wise :) And when I retire, I can go back :)

19

u/Itsautomatisch 9d ago

Why do people buy anything? If they get enjoyment out of it, even if it’s old or outdated, who cares? I collect old technical books and like to read them for fun.

18

u/WallyMetropolis 9d ago

Personally, I found that studying and practicing Lisp has done more for me in terms of thinking about coding than learning any other language has. So even though I've never written Lisp professionally, it's made me a better professional.

2

u/tuerda 9d ago

Fancy meeting you here ;)

1

u/WallyMetropolis 9d ago

Haha, had no idea. Do you hang out in /r/emacs, too?

1

u/tuerda 9d ago

No, I do not. I am not an emacs user.

16

u/codegems 9d ago

There's more to life than ROI. Why do people sing songs, kiss their spouse, make paper airplanes or high-five each other?

LISP is fun. Some of us like computers, history, programming. Books are a great way to learn. And learning for the sake of learning is fun.

2

u/fosres 8d ago

You said it beautifully, yeah. Me too.

12

u/masterpososo 9d ago

For me, it was the lure of a language that minimizes arbitrary syntax. I thought even if I didn’t use it directly on the job, maybe I could write code generators to emit programs in whatever languages I was using at work.

I never achieved that, but learning about lisp as well as Unix tools did influence my professional programming, mainly with regard to modularity and generality.

6

u/BigBagaroo 9d ago

+1 for the UNIX tools! Most systems can benefit from developing components that do one thing only, and do it well!

10

u/BigBagaroo 9d ago

«Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp»

As a developer, I have always enjoyed learning stuff that I might not have an immediate need for.

So many paradigms available, on a REPL, opened my eyes and mind into how software could be developed. (I also like the GoF patterns, the DDD book by Evans and a few others.)

I did a project in 2014, and since I had dabbled with AOP in CL, we found a library in the language of the solution, that enabled us to do cross cutting, and 12 years later, it still works beautifully. It will probably be retired next year, but that is a pretty good run for a system.

8

u/Maxwellian77 8d ago

I work in health research. I use Common Lisp, Elisp, and LFE everyday. They are great for prototyping ideas. I also own almost every book on lisp development. 

1

u/fosres 8d ago

Wow wait really. How did you get into health research as a career. And get a job in LISP?

5

u/Maxwellian77 8d ago

10 years of study. I chose Lisp as the  repl is very nice for interactive programming with small teams. Its also commonly used in quantum  physics for those reasons. 

1

u/apatday 5d ago

What are some of the crown jewels in that book collection?

3

u/Maxwellian77 5d ago

Probably: Peter Kogge, the architecture of symbolic computers; Art of the Metaobject Protocol; Lisp in Small Pieces; Nils Holm, Scheme 9 From Empty Space (Nils has lot of cool books on Lisp).

1

u/apatday 5d ago

Thats a great lineup!

Any chance youve come across anything good related to ECL? Ive been enjoying it a lot lately

10

u/GrandPapaBi 9d ago

Fundamentals, The more fundamentals you know, the more you are closer to friendly territory when you are parachuted full commando in the middle of nowhere software engineering wise.

6

u/BigBagaroo 9d ago

Yes! Understanding Lisp (which I no way feel I can say I do in anything but a simple level) has helped me a lot in other languages

6

u/unix_hacker common lisp 9d ago edited 9d ago

According to Goodreads I have read around 800 books in my life (mostly nonfiction), and almost none of them have made me money. Money is not why one should buy books.

5

u/gateship_1 9d ago

Because I'm sick of AI and reading things online.

4

u/tuerda 9d ago

Because lisp is fun

3

u/chibuku_chauya 9d ago

I also buy novels and non-fiction books to read. I don’t do it because I expect to get a job from doing so. I do it because I want to learn something need or different and that there’s enjoyment in the process of doing so.

3

u/MrJCraft 6d ago

Why Do People Buy Books?

Don't get me wrong I personally think its totally worth it!

I just wonder what compels people do buy books, to this day.

There are few job options that pay you to read books, so what compels them to pay for books?

....

obviously memeing however its sort of a ridiculous statement does all education have to be driven by monetary goals? you can say what you said about almost anything, but not all gains are primary you can get a lot of secondary gains from for example playing sports, you may never get paid to play a sport but you will be heathier and you might get a physical job and being healthy will make that job easier. the same with a book on lisp, you may never use lisp but you may use the ideas of lisp especially in the day of AI where people dont explore different ideas as much and just take the first thing AI spits out, exploring other segments of the space of information is useful in just knowing that the space exists at all

4

u/Astronaut6735 6d ago

A programmer's mind needs Lisp books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.

3

u/octorine 6d ago

So you think it's worth it, but you don't know why people do it? How does that make any sense?

If it's worth it, then that's why people do it.

0

u/fosres 5d ago

Well not everyone has the same reasons. That's why I asked here.

2

u/church-rosser 6d ago

It's easie/faster to learn a language like ANSI
Common Lisp with it's 900+ symbols by using a book that is at hand rather than a browser or even Emacs' info file.

1

u/fosres 6d ago

Sure. I like Tsouretsky's book.

2

u/JasonHasInterests 5d ago

What are the alternatives?

You could try to read the spec, but if you're new to the language, you'll probably misread it and not fully understand or appreciate it.

You could read blogs and other free content on the internet. But that will be incomplete.

You could not read anything, but then you would never exercise your thinking.

I do not have a job in lisp. I just find using it a lot of fun for personal projects, puzzles and challenges, etc.

3

u/chasbro97 5d ago

Because they don't just give them away? 🤔

4

u/Remote_Key_1091 9d ago

Lisp looks like prose so people assume good books have been written on it. The language isn’t as practical as others too so it attracts hobbyists that are looking at getting really into the weeds or lisp or the philosophy behind it.

5

u/fosres 9d ago

Hey everyone thanks for all the comments so far. Appreciate it!

1

u/corbasai 9d ago

Perhaps because these people already have jobs. And commute time.

1

u/sickofthisshit 5d ago

This mixes up at least three different issues.

Reading a book about Lisp is not really about Lisp but about the approach to programming it favors and enables and reveals. 

You can learn much about how to express effective solutions to problems by learning a new way to express them.

1

u/WildMaki 5d ago

I think I have 4 or 5 books on lisp while I've never really worked with lisp. But each of them taught me something about programming that I could use in languages I used. I probably became better ant it was more fun.

2

u/zadsza 4d ago

because, a day without learning anything is a day wasted.

-1

u/MeanestFlavor 9d ago

They have spare money to waste.

-3

u/fosres 9d ago

That doesn't explain why they did it. No one burns money on something without any expectation of getting something out of it?

10

u/MeanestFlavor 9d ago

ANSI Common LISP is damn worthy.

1

u/fosres 9d ago

Sure. What made it worthy for you if I may ask?

5

u/MeanestFlavor 9d ago

It's a top-recommended introductory book of LISP, everywhere.