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Practical Common Lisp

Google TechTalks3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2011–2025
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talk · intermediate · evergreen · 2011–2025 on HN

Peter Seibel's 2006 Google TechTalk on Practical Common Lisp, framed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Paul Graham's Blub paradox. It shows Lisp features such as condition restarts and its generic-function object system.

HN remembers it as the memorable explanation of restarts and multiple dispatch, referenced whenever those features come up.

Functional programmingProgramming language design#commonlisp#multipledispatch#conditionrestarts#peterseibel

5 comments from Hacker News

@ethagnawl2025-06 · in “Ovld – Efficient and featureful multiple dispatch for Python”

I will forever think of this talk by Peter Siebel (author of Practical Common Lisp) whenever I hear about multiple dispatch: ▶ this video

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@jlg232016-04 · in “A polyglot's guide to multiple dispatch”

Peter Seibel's talk "Practical Common Lisp"[1] covers that from a different angle, also comparing multiple dispatch with the visitor pattern. [1] ▶ this video

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@jlg232015-07 · in “Use Cases for Change-Class in Common Lisp”

The author provides a good example of legitimate use of change-class with his compiler example. About violating "some earlier architectural plan" in the case of libraries: Being able to do this allows CL programmers to freely mix libraries with different "architectural plans" without resorting to some half-baked fusion architecture that has to account for the different styles used by the libraries. Last but not least, change-class is not a hack - it's behavior is well defined and documented. And when you consider that CL's "object orientation" is more generic that c++'s or java's, based on generic methods alone, inferring from c++- or java-paradigms to good CL style just does not work. Peter Seibel's talk "Practical Common Lisp" at google explains that pretty well: ▶ this video

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@tdrgabi2011-05 · in “The German School of Lisp ("Fluchtpunkt Lisps")”

I agree that my macros explanation was stretched. I simplified it too much. Restarts are really nice, I first heard about them in "Practical Common Lisp" google talk: ▶ this video

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@bjoli2019-11 · in “Overview of Rust error handling libraries”

Peter Seibel talks about it in Practical Common Lisp and in the talk he had at Google about the book: ▶ this video The book is available online I think.

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