Book Wrapup

Congratulations for finishing this book!

I love programming in Lisp languages with concise code and a bottom-up approach to development. I hope you now also share this enthusiasm with me.

Common Lisp is sometimes criticised as not having as many useful libraries as some newer languages like Python and Java, and this is a valid criticism. That said, I hope the wide variety of examples in this book will convince you that Common Lisp is a good choice for many types of programming projects.

I would like to thank you for reading my book and I hope that you enjoyed it. As I mentioned in the Introduction I have been using Common Lisp since the mid-1980s, and other Lisp dialects for longer than that. I have always found something almost magical developing in Lisp. Being able to extend the language with macros and using the development technique of building a mini-language in Lisp customized for an application enables programmers to be very efficient in their work. I have usually found that this bottom-up development style helps me deal with software complexity because the lower level functions tend to get well tested while the overall system being developed is not yet too complex to fully understand. Later in the development process these lower level functions and utilities almost become part of the programming language and the higher level application logic is easier to understand because you have fewer lines of code to fit inside your head during development.

I think that unless a programmer works in very constrained application domains, it often makes sense to be a polyglot programmer. I have tried, especially in the new material for this fourth edition, to give you confidence that Common Lisp is good for both general software development language and also as “glue” to tie different systems together.

Thank you for buying and reading my book!

Mark Watson