AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Amen to tools for thought. Not clear turning a programming language into an OS is the ultimate tool, although it is suggestive. This is the thing about Lisp – it may be a programming language but it also feels like a medium for expressing ideas. Most languages are utilitariand and don't feel like thinking.
This was all lots of fun, and the systems were successful as academic projects go. But it wasn't leading me to the Grand Insights I thought I should be having. The implicit vision behind these efforts was something that could scale up to something more like Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind, which was a mechanical model not just of animal behavior but of human thought. I don't think that ever happened, and while I might blame my own inadequacies it might be also be that Minsky's theories were not very language-like. A good language like Lisp is built around basically a single idea, or maybe two. Minsky's theory was a suite of many dozens of ideas, each of which was at least in theory mechanizable, but they didn't necessary slot together cleanly as concepts do in a pristine language design.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Hal Abelson and Jerry Sussman. In olden times, used as the text for the first course in MIT's CS program. Uses Scheme (a Lisp dialect) which gives it a certain timeless feel.
I have a Lisp library Wu Wei (Lisp) that I named for no very good reason, but I do think there is a deep relationship between wu-wei and the characterization of hackers as "lazy engineers" by Stewart Brand (see deep laziness)
A modern Lisp dialect. Has a very different underlying philosophy from Common Lisp. Common Lisp's attitude was to let users do anything. Clojure by contrast is very opinionated: it encourages a pure functional approach, and strongly dislikes objects, for instance.
A big influence and so far the only one that isn't a person (John McCarthy invented the first version but it's grown quite beyond his original concept). I learned Lisp by hanging out at the MIT AI lab with some of the Symbolics founders, and have been using it as my main tool ever since. The Lisp Machine remains at the pinnacle of environments for programming as a design activity; I don't know why the state of the art hasn't advanced since then.
Working in Lisp gives you a kind of feeling that is hard to describe; its almost as if abstractions take on a tactile quality; there is very little boundary between thought and its realization. Lisp is not the only computational system to have this quality, but it's been the one I've made a home in. Roam has some of that quality and it's not a coincidence that it is implemented in the Lisp dialect Clojure.