My Land of Lisp Notes

The files in this repo are the abundance of notes I took while reading through Conrad Barski’s fantastic book Land of Lisp.

I went through the book quite a while ago, though I’ve ended up sending my notes to quite a few people so far, so why not make a repository for them?

The repo contains primarily Org files with live Lisp code blocks in them. So, while you can read it all on GitHub (Which has incomplete Org support), I highly recommend viewing the files in Emacs so you can play with the blocks of code and click all the links in the documents.

Now, a quick rundown of the files I have in the repo (They aren’t exactly alphabetical):

The notes

• The Text Adventure: The first real game made in Land of Lisp
• Text Adventure extras and Graphviz: Where we make a Graphviz graph generator that will be used quite a bit in the future.
• Grand Theft Wumpus: The second game made in the book, a re-imagining of Hunt the Wumpus with a twist!
• Data Types besides the obvious: Notes for the introduction of arrays, hash tables, structs, and streams.
• Generic Programming: Polymorphism, Lisp style!
• Orc Battle!: A strategy game that shows off generic polymorphism for its different types of enemies.
• Hackity hack: Originally to show off all kinds of Lisp hackiness, though in the end, I just ended up writing a little bit about format.
• Evolution: A chapter that uses loop to drive an evolution simulator.
• Let’s Create a Web Server!: Creating a web server in Lisp from scratch…
• Functional Programming: Since I already love functional programming, I didn’t take too many notes here.
• Dice of Doom: The beginning of the end! AI, decision trees, Minmax, and functional programming to make a Risk-like board game.
• Creating SVGs: The chapter that lets you make a DSL using Lisp Macros to create SVG images.
• Revisiting the Text Adventure: Building an interactive world.
• Dice of Doom: Lazy edition: Lazy evaluation and handling damn-near infinite sized data structures. Now our game can be huge.
• Dice of Doom: On teh interwebz!: Making Dice of Doom have a pretty interface with SVG graphics. Oh my!
• Dice of Doom: Party hard edition: In this chapter, we add more opponents, so we can have a 4-player brawl.

Other Files

• Experiments: Just a few boring experiments with some neat features.
• CLISP thingies: I used SBCL for most of the book, and this file had an explanation of some of the CLISP-specific code in it.