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jdkschang / gist:d994e0add7e9cf83991acc3f4847f9c1
Created September 13, 2026 22:16 — forked from jackrusher/gist:5139396
Hofstadter on Lisp: Atoms and Lists, re-printed in Metamagical Themas.

Hofstadter on Lisp

In the mid-80s, while reading through my roommate's collection of Scientific American back issues, I encountered this introduction to Lisp written by Douglas Hofstadter. I found it very charming at the time, and provide it here (somewhat illegally) for the edification of a new generation of Lispers.

In a testament to the timelessness of Lisp, you can still run all the examples below in emacs if you install these aliases:

(defalias 'plus #'+)
(defalias 'quotient #'/)
(defalias 'times #'*)
(defalias 'difference #'-)