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Comment on Ask HN: What does a developer need to know to build their own Lisp from scratch?parent

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Last time I read about the book (I have it and started working through it.), people did not recommend it (here on HN), due to how the author chooses to implement things later on in the book. Instead people recommended looking at MAL ("Make A Lisp") repos.

I started working through the book using Rust instead of C, which allowed me to parse things in a safe way, making sure, that my grammar covers all cases in a typesafe way. If anyone works through the book, I recommend avoiding the use of C, which is used in the book itself.

However, before reading part of the book, I already had watched part of the Minikanren uncourse, where Will Byrd writes a Scheme parser (well, the basic part of it, not implementing the whole standard), explaining everything quite well, which made me confident, that I could change the language I use to implement the things in the book and still get things right.

So my recommendation is to look at the Minikanren Uncourse videos. It should be in the first 4 videos of the series.

Thank you for your comment.

I did not knew about the existence of MAL.

I will check it out.

Moreover, in line of the original question asked, I would just suggest The Little Schemer. Here you not only learn the language and how to think recursively, but you also learn how to implement a lot of the in-built and library functions that comes with languages.

The Little Schemer was a life changing book for me.

I would also definitely recommend The Little Schemer. Big fan of the 10 rules here : ) It might not be the easiest to understand in some parts though.

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