u/arthurno1in r/ProgrammingLanguages • Recommends
Peter Seibel on Lisp and Programming Languages
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#commonlisp#macros#multipledispatch
Practical Common Lisp
Google TechTalks
349K subscribers • 56 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 4 people: 3 on Hacker News and 1 in engineering communities.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2011 to 2025.
- Presented by Peter Seibel, author of Practical Common Lisp
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
98K views19 years ago4 recommendations
Programming languagesLisp and ClojureLanguage design and type systems
Peter Seibel introduces Common Lisp, explaining its unique features like macros, condition restarts, and multiple dispatch, framed around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Google TechTalks May 10, 2006 Peter Seibel ABSTRACT In the late 1920's linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf hypothesized that the thoughts we can think are largely determined by the language we speak. In his essay "Beating the Averages" Paul Graham echoed this notion and invented a hypothetical language, Blub, to explain why it is so hard for programmers to appreciate programming language features that aren't present in their own favorite language. Does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis hold for computer languages? Can you be a great software architect if you only speak Blub? Doesn't Turing equivalence imply that language choice is just another implementation detail? Yes, no, and no says Peter...Why it's here
4 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as an excellent introduction to Lisp's powerful features like condition restarts and multiple dispatch.
tdrgabion Hacker News • Recommends
On “The German School of Lisp ("Fluchtpunkt Lisps")”
I agree that my macros explanation was stretched. I simplified it too much. Restarts are really nice, I first heard about them in "Practical Common Lisp" google talk: link to this video
jlg23on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Use Cases for Change-Class in Common Lisp”
…ge-class is not a hack - it's behavior is well defined and documented. And when you consider that CL's "object orientation" is more generic that c++'s or java's, based on generic methods alone, inferring from c++- or java-paradigms to good CL style just does not work. Peter Seibel's talk "Practical Common Lisp" at google explains that pretty well: link to this video…
jlg23on Hacker News • Recommends
On “A polyglot's guide to multiple dispatch”
Peter Seibel's talk "Practical Common Lisp"1 covers that from a different angle, also comparing multiple dispatch with the visitor pattern. 1 link to this video
ethagnawlon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ovld – Efficient and featureful multiple dispatch for Python”
I will forever think of this talk by Peter Siebel (author of Practical Common Lisp) whenever I hear about multiple dispatch: link to this video
bjolion Hacker News • Mentions
On “Overview of Rust error handling libraries”
Peter Seibel talks about it in Practical Common Lisp and in the talk he had at Google about the book: link to this video The book is available online I think.