3 HN users recommended this talk4 months2011–2025score 4
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN remembers it as the memorable explanation of restarts and multiple dispatch, referenced whenever those features come up.
Peter Seibel's 2006 Google TechTalk on Practical Common Lisp, framed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Paul Graham's Blub paradox. It shows Lisp features such as condition restarts and its generic-function object system.
“I will forever think of this talk by Peter Siebel” (HN, 2025)
I agree that my macros explanation was stretched. I simplified it too much. Restarts are really nice, I first heard about them in "Practical Common Lisp" google talk: [this video]
The author provides a good example of legitimate use of change-class with his compiler example. About violating "some earlier architectural plan" in the case of libraries: Being able to do this allows CL programmers to freely mix libraries with different "architectural plans" without resorting to some half-baked fusion architecture that has to account for the different styles used by the libraries. Last but not least, change-class is not a hack - it's behavior is well defined and documented. And when you consider that CL's "object orientation" is more generic that c++'s or java's, based on generic methods alone, inferring from c++- or java-paradigms to good CL style just does not work. Peter Seibel's talk "Practical Common Lisp" at google explains that pretty well: [this video]
Explains Common Lisp's generic-method object system versus C++/Java.
Peter Seibel's talk "Practical Common Lisp"[1] covers that from a different angle, also comparing multiple dispatch with the visitor pattern. [1] [this video]
Compares multiple dispatch with the visitor pattern.
Peter Seibel talks about it in Practical Common Lisp and in the talk he had at Google about the book: [this video] The book is available online I think.
Seibel discusses Lisp error handling in his Google talk.
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