Lisp Idioms

Gene Michael Stover wrote about Common Lisp as someone who hardly ever looked at anyone else's idiomatic use of the language. I was pretty bummed that he got published in Dr. Dobbs with some pretty awful CL code.

Might be useful to mention that these are mostly specific to CL.

If you happen to know the sequence is a list then might as well (apply #'min '(1 2 3 4 5)) instead of (reduce #'min '(1 2 3 4 5)).

I'm sure the author is aware of that, but a reader might get the impression that #'min can only take two arguments.

His first accumulate misses what is to me the most obvious way:

(defun accumulate-f (n) (let* ((end (list (next))) (n (1- n)) (start end)) (dotimes (_ n start) (rplacd end (cons (next) nil)) (setq end (cdr end)))))