The little LISPer

What Hacker News says

1. SteveJSNov 2025
   The summer before i took 6.001 i read “The little LISPer”. It is a good intro.

   This is the version i read:

   https://www.abebooks.com/9780023397639/Little-LISPer-Third-E...

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2. jhbadgerJul 2024
   There is a very practical embedable logic-programming engine called miniKanren for many programming languages that can be used to add the logic-programming techniques of Prolog to other languages.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniKanren

   There's a great book in the same series as the "Little Lisper"/"Little Schemer" books called "The Reasoned Schemer" that uses MiniKanren with Scheme.

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3. grego61Nov 2023
   "The Little LISPer", by Daniel Friedman, brought FP home for me.
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4. _glassOct 2023
   I second this experience. In my undergrad I wrote so much by hand, and I really had to step back a lot of times, and do it by hand, again, like a kata. Also I learned so much with writing by hand the answers to The Little Lisper etc.
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5. MathMonkeyManSep 2023
   I didn't read the book, but I watched the recorded [lectures][1]. I got the sense that course was the tip of an iceberg of an entire academic discipline of programming philosophy and practical wisdom. On its face, though, it is an introduction to programming that starts with symbolic substitution, moves on to mutation and other tricks, and then I think gets into interpreter design.

   If you want your mind blown, read "The Little Schemer" (or the original "The Little Lisper," or another of its variants). I particularly like the section near the end where the Y combinator is (secretly) described. The goal of that book is to "teach you to think recursively." It's not about writing recursive functions at work, but about appreciating the self-referential properties of algorithms.

   [1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8FE88AA54363BC46

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6. mastoMay 2022
   I feel that way about anything that tries to explain concepts with cartoons. “why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby” as a prime example of something I can’t look at for 5 minutes without wanting to burn it. Yet I know that lots of people are big fans of this approach. So I can only deduce that the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum. What might be right for you may not be right for some.

   Personally, I put The Little Lisper/Schemer on the “Greatest Programming Books Ever” shelf, next to The C Programming Language. I found the style captivating — and insidious. The first time I read it, I thought I was learning a programming language, but it subliminally reprogrammed my brain to see recursion everywhere.

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