The Roots of Lisp

The Roots of Lisp is, in my opinion, one of the weirder texts we've read, not because it's content is actually strange, but because it is very unexpected. We have been reading mostly blogs or conference transcripts about lisp where the focus in placed on the actual presentation of content and the isn't much code or anything like that. This article on the other hand reads almost like a manual with most of its content being code or brief explanations of it. That caught my by surprise, being used to other styles of text that we have read before. Anyhow, I found it difficult to read (as in heavy not actually complicated) but more interesting than I had expected, even so I don't really think it was very informative, most of what it said we already knew even if we knew it in a less detailed way and it didn't explain or even mentioned new concepts, It just went in to a lot of detail about how lisp was first created as a concept, using common lisp syntax instead of the actual mathematical syntax that its creator used. The fact is that in my opinion it wouldn't have mattered at all if we didn't read this article as I don't feel like I learned anything even barely useful from reading it, even if we count anecdotal knowledge useful given that it just added some, really hard to remember, details about the first implementation of lisp. If anything I would say that the implementation of eval was more interesting but I really don't feel like is something out of this world, i would dare to say that if we hadn't read it just now and we had an assignment to write it using clojure at least half of the class would be able to do it. I get that for its time it was a revolutionary idea but that's it.