1. CS 63 LISP Philip Greenspun's Tenth* Rule of Programming:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.“
* Note: there aren’t actually nine other rules, just the tenth one.

2. Something I stumbled across…
“…teaching Lisp by showing you how to write several complete Lisp-based games, including a text adventure, an evolution simulation, and a robot battle.”
Disclaimer: I’m not endorsing this book, I just liked the cover.

3. Why Lisp? Because it’s the most widely used AI programming language
Because it’s good for writing production software (Graham article)
Because it’s got lots of features other languages don’t
Because you can write new programs and extend old programs really, really quickly in Lisp

4. Great! How can I get started?
Run /usr/bin/clisp
From you can download CLISP for your own PC (Windows or Linux)
Great Lisp resource page:

5. Why all those parentheses?
Surprisingly readable if you indent properly (use built-in Lisp editor in emacs!)
Makes prefix notation manageable
An expression is an expression is an expression, whether it’s inside another one or not
(+ 1 2)
(* (+ 1 2) 3)
(list (* 3 5) ‘atom ‘(list inside a list) (list 3 4) ‘(((very) (very) (very) (nested list))))

6. Lisp basics Lisp syntax: parenthesized prefix notation
Lisp interpreter: read-eval-print loop
Nested evaluation
Preventing evaluation (quote and other special forms)
Forcing evaluation (eval)
Allows us to evaluate code contained in a Lisp variable!

7. Basic Lisp types Numbers (integers, floating-point, complex)
Characters, strings (arrays of chars)
#\x #\- #\B
“This is a string!”
Symbols, which have property lists
‘a ‘x ‘jon
Lists (linked cells)
Empty list: nil
‘(a b c) ‘(2 3 jon)
cons structure has car (first) and cdr (rest)

8. Built-in functions For numbers A diversion: destructive functions
+ - * / incf decf
A diversion: destructive functions
(setf x 1)
(setf y (+ x 1)) vs. (setf y (incf x))
For lists
car (first) cdr (rest) second third fourth
length nth
cons append nconc list
mapcar mapcan
find remove remove-if

9. Built-in functions (cont’d)
Printing: print, format
(print “string”)  print output
(format …)  formatted output
Advanced list processing: assoc, mapcar
Predicates: listp, numberp, stringp, atom, null, equal, eql, and, or, not
Special forms: setq/setf, quote, defun, defparameter, defconstant, if, cond, case, progn, loop

10. More Lisp types Arrays (with zero or more dimensions) Hash tables
Streams (for reading and writing)
Structures
Functions, including lambda functions
(defun incBy10 (n) (+ n 10))
(mapcar #’(lambda (n) (+ n 10))
‘( ))

11. Useful help facilities
(apropos ‘str)  list of symbols whose name contains ‘str
(describe ‘symbol)  description of symbol
(describe #’fn)  description of function
(trace fn)  print a trace of fn as it runs
:a  abort one level out of debugger

12. A Lisp example Writing a function to compute the nth Fibonacci number
Fibonacci sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, …
fib(0) = 0
fib(1) = 1
fib(n) = fib(n-2) + fib(n-1)

13. Complete Version (defun fib (n) (cond ((eql n 0) 0) ; base case
(t (+ (fib (- n 1)) ; recursively compute fib(n)
(fib (- n 2))))))

14. Complete Version with Error Checking and Comments
(defun fib (n)
"Computes the nth Fibonacci number."
(cond ((or (not (integerp n)) (< n 0)) ; error case
(error "~s must be an integer >= 0.~&" n))
((eql n 0) 0) ; base case
((eql n 1) 1) ; base case
(t (+ (fib (- n 1)) ; recursively compute fib(n)
(fib (- n 2))))))

15. Now you’ve been enlightened! …well, sort of…
Cartoon from xkcd.com