I will forever think of this talk by Peter Siebel (author of Practical Common Lisp) whenever I hear about multiple dispatch: ▶ this video
in “Ovld – Efficient and featureful multiple dispatch for Python” · View on HN
Practical Common Lisp on HackerTube: recommended by 3 Hacker News commenters across 4 separate months, 2011–2025.
talk · intermediate · evergreen
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.
HN remembers it as the memorable explanation of restarts and multiple dispatch, referenced whenever those features come up.
“I will forever think of this talk by Peter Siebel”
5 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
I will forever think of this talk by Peter Siebel (author of Practical Common Lisp) whenever I hear about multiple dispatch: ▶ this video
in “Ovld – Efficient and featureful multiple dispatch for Python” · View on HN
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
in “A polyglot's guide to multiple dispatch” · View on HN
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
in “Use Cases for Change-Class in Common Lisp” · View on HN
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
in “The German School of Lisp ("Fluchtpunkt Lisps")” · View on HN
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.
in “Overview of Rust error handling libraries” · View on HN