<story><title>On Lisp</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yonaguska</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been meaning to read this for quite some time, but I&amp;#x27;ve been told that the idioms and coding style is outdated, or not very good. This isn&amp;#x27;t going to stop me, but I&amp;#x27;d like to know from some experienced lispers what problems I might encounter. Especially as I&amp;#x27;m pretty inexperienced myself. I definitely won&amp;#x27;t know what to look for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavpanchekha</author><text>It is written to a prior version of the Common Lisp standard, and with a very old-fashioned style. You&amp;#x27;ll see calls like (REPLACA pair val) instead of (SETF (CAR pair) val) and so on. That will irk you if you are a Common Lisp hacker already. If you&amp;#x27;re not, just keep in mind that good CL style results in somewhat prettier code than that in On Lisp.</text></comment>
<story><title>On Lisp</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yonaguska</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been meaning to read this for quite some time, but I&amp;#x27;ve been told that the idioms and coding style is outdated, or not very good. This isn&amp;#x27;t going to stop me, but I&amp;#x27;d like to know from some experienced lispers what problems I might encounter. Especially as I&amp;#x27;m pretty inexperienced myself. I definitely won&amp;#x27;t know what to look for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nonrecursive</author><text>The book uses common lisp, so you&amp;#x27;ll need to know how to read that. Otherwise I think you should be fine. It&amp;#x27;s not a book about idioms or coding styles, but about thinking in lisp. If the code examples are confusing, it&amp;#x27;ll be because you&amp;#x27;re not sure what something means in common lisp or because you&amp;#x27;re learning new ideas, not because the code is poorly written. So, if you treat it as a book of ideas as opposed to &amp;quot;teach yourself x language in 24 hours&amp;quot;, you should be OK :)</text></comment>