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Kind of a non sequitur: I bought "The Genius of Lisp"[0] and it is not what I thought (a book entirely devoted to the history of Lisp - from MIT to Common Lisp and then to Clojure). Would anyone recommend another book?

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Lisp-Cees-Groot/dp/1069886416/

3 comments

Try these:

https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/lisp15...

(The third one includes the source code to PDP-1 Lisp.)

Wow! How did I manage to miss this treasure trove! Thank you.

The PDP-1 Lisp page has 4 rather good books linked as PDFs. Oh - but all on the earliest history of Lisp as well! That is not what you're looking for I think.

It's not a history book or even all that much a book about Lisp, despite its name, but Lisp in Small Pieces incidentally covers a lot of Lisp history. The book at its core is about implementing compilers and interpreters. It starts with something close to the McCarthy meta-evaluator, and the rest of the book iteratively elaborates on why the naive meval is not a practical programming language, somewhat mirroring the evolution of historical Lisp implementations in the process.

It dates to the early 90s so it doesn't touch on Clojure or anything recent. The bibliography and citation is excellent.

> Literature about Lisp rarely resists that narcissistic pleasure of describing Lisp in Lisp. This habit began with the first reference manual for Lisp 1.5 [MAE+62] and has been widely imitated ever since. We'll mention only the following examples of that practice: (There are many others.) [Rib69], [Gre77], [Que82], [Cay83], [Cha80], [SJ93], [Rey72], [Gor75], [SS75], [A1178], [McC78b], [Lak80], [Hen80], [BM82], [CH84], [FW84], [dRS84], [AS85], [R3R86], [Mas86], [Dyb87], [WH88], [Kes88], [LF88], [Dil88], [Kam90].

https://www.amazon.ca/Lisp-Small-Pieces-Christian-Queinnec/d...