Hacker News was created by Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, as a place for tech-savvy individuals to share and discuss interesting content related to technology, startups, programming, and more.

Initially, it started as a simple link aggregator, where users could submit links to articles, blog posts, and projects they found intriguing.

Over time, it evolved into a thriving community with a strong emphasis on intellectual curiosity, thoughtful discussions, and quality content.

I'm an avid reader of Hacker News and often come across high-quality discussions from the community. I found that the courses and books people discuss on Hacker News are really good, so I conduct monthly analyses and aggregate the top courses/books found in comments and rank them.

Why Learn Lisp Programming

Lisp happens to be the second oldest (1958) programming language, only after Fortran (1957) Initially there were several dialects of Lisp, but the Common Lisp standard was published in the year 1994. Now there are several Common Lisp implementations available.

Here are some key features of Lisp:

1. Easy to Get Started
   It is quite easy to get started with Lisp. The language is built around “S-Expressions” and every expression has a value. Thus, the language is primarily a functional programming language and it doesn’t take much effort to get the basics right. Of course, it will take a while to master the intricacies of advanced features of the language such as Macros, Condition System and Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). 

2. Homoiconic
   The beauty of Lisp is that data is indistinguishable from code, in other words “code is data”. This is possible thanks to S-Expression being the “native” data structure of the language. Since both code and data are legitimate S-Expressions, code can be “inspected” as data and data “evaluated” as code!

3. Multiparadigm
   Lisp, at its core, is functional and object-oriented. It also supports procedural paradigm like other languages. Although it is not declarative in the sense of Prolog, because of its homoiconicity and “malleable” nature, it is easy to implement Prolog (with “Lispy” syntax) and then write code in this embedded Prolog. 

4. Higher-Order Programming
   Functions are “first class” objects (just as data are) in Lisp. It is possible to pass functions as parameters to other functions and also return functions from other functions. This ability allows the programmer to write generic functions whose behaviour can be fine-tuned by passing suitable execution logic. Some examples are the popular Map and Reduce operations.

Top Books

Our methodology

We conducted this analysis by "ranking things based on social signals"

It's the result of mining the HN archives for references to books and then ranking them and displaying all references in one place.

Ranking currently takes into account HN stories (points) and comments (sentiment, karma, estimated points).

Who are we

Find accountability partners, and study online courses & books with other learners. Moocable helps you find your next course/book/problem set, and lets you find study partners.