This book takes an historical perspective. When I bought my first computer in 1980, an Apple II, lower case required a hardware mod. Lisp had already been around for decades.
In every major system one can now hide upper case conventions, but they too often default to old man shouting "GET OFF MY LAWN". And of course, those parentheses. One can easily represent trees by a notation that does away with most parentheses, but instead they've become a loyalty test.
At $20 or even $30 I would have bought the PDF for this book, to keep my library complete, to support all Lisp efforts. $40 made me think. This is a pure optimization problem; one should roughly want to maximize revenue, but favoring number of copies sold for the side benefits. I doubt that $40 achieves that maximum.
I enjoyed the return to typing in upper case very much! Ancient LISP in particular is nice to type, because there are only letters and the occasional dash, asterisk and parenthesis. All the special characters in modern languages really hurt my fingers!
>One can easily represent trees by a notation that does away with most parentheses, but instead they've become a loyalty test.
But can you copy or delete an expression from that other representation by paren-matching in your editor? To me (and others I guess) this was not much of an initiation ritual. I fell in love with parentheses on first sight.
> $40 made me think.
I get that! And to be honest, writing becomes more painful as I grow older, so I adjusted the price a bit to compensate for that. So far the sales numbers suggest that people are willing to spend the money.
BTW, the PDF and paperback generate the same royalties (as with all of my books). The price difference is the production cost of the physical book. So you pay the same for the content in either case.
If it helps, I opted for the paperback. Looking forward to giving this one a read.
The caps point is interesting to me. I can't think of a good reason why caps should be shouting, but I definitely agree with it. Hilarious to remember back when mixed case was not the norm. (Also, awkward to work in languages where symbols are case sensitive. Worse when they are case significant.)
I'm curious on the tree representations you mean. Most make some use of whitespace, that I have seen. But they lose the portability of the representation that I have with easy copy/paste to other environments. (To and from chats, emails, etc.)
Right, I get that. My question is what other forms did they mean? One could use indentation. Basically yaml. That is notoriously bad for copy paste between files, though.
Edit: I see you made the same point in another post. I'm calling that portability of the code, though not sure that is the best term.
In every major system one can now hide upper case conventions, but they too often default to old man shouting "GET OFF MY LAWN". And of course, those parentheses. One can easily represent trees by a notation that does away with most parentheses, but instead they've become a loyalty test.
At $20 or even $30 I would have bought the PDF for this book, to keep my library complete, to support all Lisp efforts. $40 made me think. This is a pure optimization problem; one should roughly want to maximize revenue, but favoring number of copies sold for the side benefits. I doubt that $40 achieves that maximum.