As if Python weren't enough, now I've gone mad and printed Common Lisp: A Gentle Guide To Symbolic Computation. As the title states, it's a book on Lisp. Now, you might well wonder, "Lisp?! Of all the languages in the world, why Lisp?!". Hype, mainly. To be more specific, glowing praise from certain members of the friendly GameDev community. There is also the fact that I am getting tired with C based languages - not tired, that implies that I'm getting bored altogether of it, but I just feel like learning something entirely new. After all, broadening one's horizons is a good thing, or at least that's what they say. Is functional programming all that? Can't wait to find out. As usual, I'm too easily impressed. I don't really know what I'm expecting. A sudden revelation that will change the way I think about programming? Ehh it's possible I suppose. Unlikely, but possible.

As for the book itself, I've heard only good things. I hope it ain't too gentle though, at least not to the point where it gets boring. Perhaps I ought to actually glance through books before I go around printing them (but where's the fun in that?). Another book of high repute (out of print) is Lisp-guru Paul Graham's On Lisp, yet another (!) book available for free online as a PDF. Apparently a bit advanced, so I skipped it for now, but if I really take a shine to the language or the paradigm, I might give it a serious look. Graham has impressed me with the articles on his site, especially the famous one about Bayesian spam filtering. However, some of the articles seem a bit elitist according to my fast fading memory. But what do I know, I'm just a imperative-worshipping infidel.

Incidentally, I love PDFs, they're so nice. I know quite a few people who hate them, but they're obviously crazy. In future, everything I do is going to be in PDF. Won't you join my tea party?

PBS interviewed David Crosby and asked him why he thought the music industry today is utter nonsense. An interesting read, although I can't really judge the validity of some of Crosby's comments. Darn hippies.