I plan to. Some day.
I mean, my introduction to lisp was something to do with concat but it was so divorced from reality that I literally found an early book on C programming and semi-self taught myself it, then found a book called C Pointers and Dynamic Memory Management that literally changed my life.
I have a feeling if I'd read this book I'd have actually done something awesome by now. Frankly, this book might allow me to do something that I've been itching to do for months now.
I can't really express my appreciation enough... but I'll try right now: thank you! A million times over, thank you!
Edit: so Arc - is that like a Webserver based on lisp?
I've never been entirely certain what the relationship is between YCombinator and the Arc community, if any, but one experimental and partially black-boxed forum doesn't signal a mature language, just one adequate to a particular task.
What else have people done in Arc?
Anyway, I didn't intend to claim that Arc was a mature language.
But these days I pick a language with strong static types every time if I have the choice. I know you can use them with Lisp too to some extent but it's not the same as a language built from the ground up around types.
What topic are you into these days ? Or maybe you were planning for a sequel to PCL ? in both case really eager to see the resulting book(s).
I kind of suspect that if I write another book (as I hope to) that I'll continue along the trajectory from pure technical (PCL) to semi-technical (Coders) to something that might reach an even more general audience.
At one point he mentioned writing a book to the effect of Statistics for Programmers, which sounds intriguing to me. AFAIK it hasn't happened yet, though.
Why intriguing? The most general family of distributions can only be expressed with a programming language, so there are certainly many connections between both fields.
Incidentally, that's one of my major complaints about Lisp these days. Lisp-Stat started dying in the early 2000s and completely faded away long ago. I read PCL when it was published a decade ago and I fondly remember how enthusiastic I became about Lisp.
I have used Clojure extensively, but the ecosystem for doing math and statistics is quite reduced. The same applies to CL and Scheme. I wish I could use one Lisp for most tasks.
> Why intriguing? The most general family of distributions can only be expressed with a programming language, so there are certainly many connections between both fields.
That seems to be an argument for why it is intriguing. Were you perhaps arguing that it wasn't surprising?
Maybe for the first chapter or two, certainly not most of the book. They're very fundamentally different languages.