Yes, the book doesn't do Lisp justice, it is too short. But at the current volume, I had something at least passing muster; I'm toying with extending it but that depends on feedback/success/etc. There are a lot of Lisp implementations I haven't mentioned (or dealt with in the depth they deserve), there is a lot more to say about the sort of AI work that was (and, I think, is) done with Lisp, etc. And I have written it with a "general techie" audience in mind more than "I'm already a hardcore Lisper", I will probably disappoint the latter group with a lack of depth. I haven't aspired to LOL or PAIP or similar great works.
It's a history through a lens, but if there is one I'd say "MIT/Stanford" as a central axis rather than a field of reesarch.
And Javascript? My own choice. The amount of "language" I needed was very small and I actually like the very minimalistic (lisp-y?) sort of Javascript you can write these days if you just ignore most of its history. It's accessible, that was more important to me than anything else - one of the few concessions where I wanted to make things digestible to as wide an audience as possible in a language that was good for the problem at hand. Strangely enough, it worked very well (I think).
I heard your (and others') request for a better sample chapter than the intro that Amazon shows, I'll put it on the site as soon as possible.
That choice absolutely makes sense, once you recall that Brendan Eich was initially hired to write a Scheme! Business and Netscape being what they are, it ended up with Javascript, but there are some lispy roots.
I went for the somewhat humbler reasons of "I can assume that my reader will know it at least a bit" and "simple to obtain" - a bunch of the examples will run in the browser :-)
But yes, JS' dynamic/LISP-y roots did make my examples simple to implement and thus simple to follow. No trickery was needed, it was all pretty straightforward.
(JS is a much maligned language and for very good reasons, it had a shaky past and still is too full of warts that should be excised at some point. But modern JS with the help of modern IDEs isn't actually _that_ terrible and traits like it being prototype-based make some otherwise complicated things easy)
It's a history through a lens, but if there is one I'd say "MIT/Stanford" as a central axis rather than a field of reesarch.
And Javascript? My own choice. The amount of "language" I needed was very small and I actually like the very minimalistic (lisp-y?) sort of Javascript you can write these days if you just ignore most of its history. It's accessible, that was more important to me than anything else - one of the few concessions where I wanted to make things digestible to as wide an audience as possible in a language that was good for the problem at hand. Strangely enough, it worked very well (I think).
I heard your (and others') request for a better sample chapter than the intro that Amazon shows, I'll put it on the site as soon as possible.