Review: Let Over Lambda

So after a lot of not reading Doug Hoyte's Let Over Lambda, I finally did manage to read it all the way through.

My overall impression first: Hoyte styles the book as a successor to PG's On Lisp; I think Let Over Lambda falls short of that goal, although it does contain enough interesting material to make the book worthwhile.

The best parts of the book are the chapter on read macros and the subsection on sorting networks. Great, practical examples and illustrations of good programming style.

The worst parts of the book are the chapter on implementing a Forth interpreter in Lisp and the "caddar accessor generator" (it's ok for me to say this because the name of this blog is ironic).

The chapter on anaphoric macros has finally made me change my mind about those things. It's ok, use them when you need them. All the stuff about "sub-lexical scoping" (ie - various interesting ways of using macros to capture free variables) didn't really make a deep impression on me - maybe I'm just too dull to see any good uses for that.

As pointed out in other reviews, the book could have used a lot more proofreading (esp of the code) and editing. Hoyte chose to self-publish the book, which I think was a mistake (and just today Tim Ferriss blogged about some other reasons why it's not a good idea).

To cap the review, don't read Let Over Lambda until you've read On Lisp. It's a fun book about some interesting Common Lisp programming techniques, but it could have been shorter.