The Little Schemer

Back in the days when I used to customize Autocad with AutoLisp, I bought several books on the LISP programming language. The best, most interesting, and most charming of all of these was called The Little Lisper. The book was simply a pleasure to read because of the wit and clean, clear writing of authors Daniel Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. I never forgot that book, which took me on a journey into recursion and even into dabbling with human-conversation simulation with lists.

When I went to add The Little Lisper to this page, I found that it is temporarily unavailable. As I continued investigating, I found a new effort by these two witty authors is now avaiable, called The Little Schemer has been published. Scheme is a dialect of LISP. LISP, for those who do not know it, is one of the foremost languages for artificial intelligence, because it is so good at list-processing.

I surveyed the reviews of this new book and the reviews looked similar to what these authors have received for The Little Lisper. One of the reviews said "Charming and Delightful but also Massively Mind-Stretching". Sounds like what I remember of The Little Lisper.