What are you interested in? The recommendations I can make for someone fascinated with LISP are different than the ones I can make for someone interested in computing history are different than the ones I can make for someone interested in processor design and so on. There's a very wide selection here.
It was Leigh Klotz's sarcastic response to a Defense Department questionnaire to Terrapin about how their technology could be used to kill people.
He proposed deploying a swarm of thousands of LOGO turtles to crawl around the battlefield in mesmerizing geometric patterns, and stab the enemy with a quick succession of PENUP and PENDOWN commands (proving once again that the pen is mightier than the sword).
> I'm biased because this one is effectively "What if we make an APL Lisp?"
You might like this excerpt from the MIT Dynamic Languages Wizard's panel, where Guy Steele said [1]:
> Higher order functionals, I think, are underrated, and can be very good. As the years pass, the more I use Common Lisp, the more I find myself using the sequence functions, including a lot of mapcars. I had to do a matrix tensor product routine about two weeks ago, and I was puzzling over how to do the nested do loops and so forth, and finally I realized it was just mapcar of mapcar of apply of append to mapcar and mapcar, done. No big deal. In other words, thinking in APL should improve your Lisp code.
Steele has many comments I love in regards to APL! Unlike many, he still sees it as a great path. He's a fantastic example of someone who's competent enough that they have no reason to slander other languages.
I strongly recommend the first paper. I am still trying to realize something like it. I often wonder what Hillis and Steele would say about the topic..and whether they abandoned the idea because it wasn't tactically effective or whether it was just intractable.
really glad to see it mentioned...too much great thought gets lost
> I often wonder what Hillis and Steele would say about the topic..and whether they abandoned the idea because it wasn't tactically effective or whether it was just intractable.
