A modernized and annotated code companion to Paul Graham's “On Lisp”

In plain words

This is a modernized and annotated code companion to Paul Graham's classic book "On Lisp." It provides updated versions of the code examples from the book along with explanatory annotations to help developers understand Lisp programming concepts. The resource is designed for programmers learning Lisp or studying advanced functional programming techniques through Graham's influential work.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

• IW
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  The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…

• IM
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• PA
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