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Practical Common Lisp

Google TechTalks · 98.3K views · 2007-10-09 · 1:12:10

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Overview

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.

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

Recommended by 3 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2011–2025

Topics

Functional programmingProgramming language design
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common lispmultiple dispatchcondition restartspeter seibellanguage design

What people said

ethagnawl · 2025-06 · Recommendation

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

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jlg23 · 2016-04 · Recommendation

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

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jlg23 · 2015-07 · Recommendation

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: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Google TechTalks, played through YouTube.

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