Paip-lisp Alternatives

paip-lisp reviews and mentions

• Ask HN: Where are the good Markdown to PDF tools (that meet these requirements)?
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2025

  I think Pandoc and Calibre could work for you.

  I've worked on PAIP, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, and I might be able to help you a bit. It's around 1k pages long. I used Pandoc to generate an epub file, and then Calibre to turn that into a PDF file. I just tried using Pandoc to generate the PDF file directly, and it/LaTeX choked on some Unicode characters.

  For internal ebook links, there's a Lua script. You'll have to keep anchors unique across the book for this:

  * good: "chapter1#section1_1" and "chapter2#section2_1"

  * bad: a "chapter1#section1" and a "chapter2#section1"

  WIP: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/pull/195

  For line wrapping of code, there's CSS. I first used it over on "Writing an Operating System in 1,000 Lines"; here's the PR: https://github.com/nuta/operating-system-in-1000-lines/pull/...

• Years in Common Lisp: 2023-2024 in review
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Feb 2025

  I've worked on PAIP, and I think the GitHub.com version - https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/ - gets more attention than the GitHub.io version linked here. The GitHub.io version automatically gets updates, I think, but I'm not verifying the Markdown works over there.

• Ask HN: What is the best method for turning a scanned book as a PDF into text?
  13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Feb 2025

  I made a high-quality scan of PAIP (Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming), and worked on OCR'ing and incorporating that into an admittedly imperfect git repo of Markdown files. I used Scantailor to deskew and do other adjustments before applying Tesseract, via OCRmyPDF. I wrote notes for some of my process over at https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/releases/tag/v1.2 .

  I'd also tried ocrit, which uses Apple's Vision framework for OCR, with some success - https://github.com/insidegui/ocrit

  It's an ongoing, iterative process. I'll watch this thread with interest.

  Some recent threads that might be helpful:

  * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443022 - Show HN: Adventures in OCR

  * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43045801 - Benchmarking vision-language models on OCR in dynamic video environments - driscoll42 posted some stats from research

  * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43043671 - OCR4all

  (Meaning, I have these browser tabs open, I haven't fully digested them yet)

• Write a model to do AI problem solving in under 200 lines of code
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2024
• Show HN: Lessons learned from a big OCR project
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Dec 2024

  Oh wow! I've worked on turning Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming from a book into a bunch of Markdown files, but that's "only" about a thousand pages long, compared to the roughly 27000 pages long of all those volumes. I have advice, possibly helpful, possibly not.

  Getting higher quality scans could save you some headaches. Check the Internet Archive. Or, get library copies, and the right camera setup.

  Scantailor might help; it lets you semi-automate a chunk of things, with interactive adjustments. I don't know how its deskewing would compare to ImageMagick. The signature marks might be filtered out here.

  I wrote out some of my process for handling scans here - https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/releases/tag/v1.2 . I maybe should blog about it.

  If you get to the point of collaborative proofreading, I highly recommend Semantic Linefeeds - each sentence gets its own line. https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/ I got there by:

  * giving each paragraph its own line

  * then, linefeed at punctuation, maybe with quotation marks and parentheses? It's been a while

• Alonzo Church: The Forgotten Architect of Computer Intelligence
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Nov 2024

  A historical tidbit which I loved in Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (available in PDF and EPUB here - https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp):

  > The name lambda comes from the mathematician Alonzo Church's notation for functions (Church 1941). Lisp usually prefers expressive names over terse Greek letters, but lambda is an exception. A better name would be make-function. Lambda derives from the notation in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, which used a caret over bound variables: x̂(x + x). Church wanted a one-dimensional string, so he moved the caret in front: ^x(x + x). The caret looked funny with nothing below it, so Church switched to the closest thing, an uppercase lambda, Λx(x + x) . The Λ was easily confused with other symbols, so eventually the lowercase lambda was substituted: λx(x + x). John McCarthy was a student of Church's at Princeton, so when McCarthy invented Lisp in 1958, he adopted the lambda notation. There were no Greek letters on the keypunches of that era, so McCarthy used (1ambda (x) (+ x x)), and it has survived to this day.

  So, yes, on the topic of this post - Church pops up in loads of Lisp retrospectives. Maybe he's "forgotten" by people with very little engagement in the history of computing.

• The Liberating Experience of Common Lisp
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Oct 2024
• Unification in Elixir
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jul 2024

  While I'm at (free) books: a great example implementation of unification is in chapter 11 "Logic Programming" of Peter Norvig's "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp".

  https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

• Meaningful Nonsense: How I generate sentences
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 May 2024

  A good old fashioned AI approach, e.g. compare with Peter Norvig's https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/simple.li...

  > A third, quieter feeling - if the universe was to communicate some message, who’s to say it would not choose this as a conduit?

  Look away before you feel compelled to write your own operating system - maybe "SacredOS"?

• The Loudest Lisp Program
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 May 2024

  Have you seen https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/ ? "Kludges" everywhere is applicable. On the other hand, having a function like "row-major-aref" that allows accessing any multi-dimensional array as if it were one dimensional is "sweeter than the honeycomb".

  I still think CL code can be beautiful. Norvig's in PAIP https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp is nice.

  As for the inside-out remark, while technically you do it, you don't have to, and it's very convenient to not do. Clojure has its semi-famous arrow macro that lets you write things in a more sequential style, it exists in CL too, and there's always the venerable let* binding. e.g. 3 options:

      (loop (print (eval (read))))

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