Common LISPcraft

You may have noticed my ANSI Common Lisp [ACL] book chapters' reviews, days 181299 and 211299 and I do intend to go on reviewing it [soon], but I simply couldn't resist "going back on time" and re-read my first ever Lisp book: Common LISPcraft, by Robert Willensky.

This book was first published 16 years ago [1984], and - ouch! - it remains a much better reading than the alternative most Universities are going for right now, which is Paul Graham's ACL.

I write that Common LISPcraft is a much better reading, if your aim is to learn the language. It happens that the 3rd chapter of ACL goes on implementing compression / de-compression algorithms, binary trees and so on... which, no matter how interesting such subjects are, surely is not the path to go for beginners.

On the other hand, Common LISPcraft is so simple, that anyone with no programming experience can really learn Lisp! Its simplicity comes from the wonderfully chosen examples, and not exactly from not covering all there is about Lisp... In fact, both books are complete, although ACL goes deeper into more recent features.

Both books are great, but if you are just starting with [good] programming, you may find ACL a bit too strong.

Again I did not forget the special amazon.co.uk deals for selling these [and other] Lisp books, but I can't afford to do that right now. Keep waiting. As soon as I have one or two hours available, such selling will debut! And I will be one of the buyers :), as I don't own an original of Robert Willensky's original [!]... as the pictures surely show...

The Rally of Wales, is Rally Championship's [RC] first challenge, for beginners. It all starts in a sunny day, at a somewhat clean stage, with just a few traps, like some logs and rocks, that are too near the road and may get hit by rookies... But as the rally goes on, it becomes obvious that RC is a much harder game, than you were expecting.

The most interesting "novelty" is the need to take care of your car. You simply can not, or should not, bump against objects, go off-road like if @ the Granada-Dakar, drive on the red-line all the time, brake with all you've got and expect the car to have a sane straight behavior, or jump 3 meters high and land undamaged... Even when you [often] escape these adventures, they will cost you, the next stage.

It all gets very obvious when driving on snow. After successfully reaching stages 5 and 6 of the Wales challenge, I penalized, entering the stages, in order to fix some unhealthy parts of my Peugeot, namely the clutch and the differential. But there is a penalty limit, and you simply must race with what you've got. So I did, with a very much suffering cool system, poor brakes [that pointed the car right, everytime pressed], bad electrics [that made the lights switch on / off], and other less serious problems.

The snowy nocturne stages @ Wales take an average of 17 minutes to conclude, and such a long torture can be a total demolition to the good old Peugeot 106. After some 10 minutes, the engine was smoking all around, I had lost 2nd and 3rd gears, I had no lights, and the steering simply didn't turn naturally.. When I finally reached [!] the end of it, I was NOT allowed to go on, after failing inspection! Great stuff!

So, you finally have a more realistic rally simulator, that worries about damage and that throws you against half-an-hour stages!, with the [true] chance of only repairing your car @ pre-determined places.

Of course I still didn't complete Wales and because I am interested @ the top 10, that may take a while to achieve :), mainly because I simply don't have more than some 30 minutes a day to drive :(