One could argue, that "raw foodism" isn't really technology. In your example the technology would be "fire" or "cooking".

"Wishful thinking" is a great technique to produce clear and concise code. I use it whenever possible. It's absolutely recommendable!

I don't recall if PG used the term, but Gerald Sussman uses it in the SICP video lectures.

It's a sign that it's probably a comfortable conceptual boundary in explaining what you're trying to do.

The long compilation time is due to the optimization options. Without optimization it compiles in a few seconds.

Yet, the macros leave plenty of space for optimization. See the size of your executable compared to the unoptimized one of qwph above.

"Like Perl, C++ is a swiss army chainsaw of a programming language. Unlike Perl, it's got all the blades simultaneously and permanently cast in a fixed half-open position. Don't turn it on."

Priceless.

At least one, considering that PG wrote he used vi.

Apart from that, I think an 'easy' editor would help beginners. I you know neither Emacs nor Lisp, Emacs is quite a tough beast.

I've never tried it, but I know of people using Cusp, the Lisp extension for Eclipse: http://bitfauna.com/projects/cusp/

I should have learned Emacs at University, but they stopped teaching it the year before I arrived. And it's too much of a learning curve to learn it on my own.

Is there any sort of beginner/self-learner friendly tutorial for emacs?

I think many people would like to use emacs, but run into too many barriers.

This is a good starting point: Learning GNU Emacs http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565921528/

This might ease some pains: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs

Thanks for the links. And thanks for all the advice guys.

I learned it on my first job - probably the best way to learn since you can learn from other pros.

Emacs is a great editor, but word of caution: you will spend countless hours customizing it. I think after 15 years of use, I have gained those lost weekends hacking elisp :)

The tutorial built into emacs is actually quite good. C-h t

Yeah. Emacs is a massive pain to learn. In my case, I forced myself to stop using other tools so I would have to learn it. Come to think about it, thats pretty much how I learn everything. I learnt about linux after I forcefully removed windows from my laptop and I learned how to use bash after I forced myself to stop using nautilus.

Was it worth it?

yes.

PG uses vi to code in Lisp, used to copy-and-paste to repl but he now drags-and-drops code to repl!!!!! 0_o

(I am not kidding)

He said "All English-speaking countries are in top 10", not "All countries in the top 10 are english-speaking".

I want to master the way of the Lisp Jedi.

  "These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons, for a more ... civilized age."

http://xkcd.com/297/

Absolutely!

But although SICP teaches you a great deal about Lisp techniques, it doesn't teach Common Lisp. Abelson and Sussman use Scheme. If you are aware of the differences, it should be no problem, though.

This has been written 10k times here: The video lectures are great, the book is great (It's also free on the internet)! If you don't depend on Common Lisp, this is probably the best Lisp (and programming in genereal) introduction out there. As a follow-up, Paul Graham's "On Lisp" is a great choice.

If you can find a copy of On Lisp (I know it's available online but I just can't read books online).

Yes, the price on Amazon is just insane. I printed the pdf, which worked quite well.

At 1,000,000 items you have 20 (in the best case, at least) levels of recursion. I can assure you, your stack space is more than sufficient for that.

Also, you only have to push a handful of pointers to the stack, which doesn't seem to be expensive to me.