Fwiw, I wrote an invited paper, "Condition Handling in the Lisp
Language Family", for Springer-Verlag's just-released Lecture Notes in
Computer Science (LNCS) 2022: Advances in Exception Handling
Techniques.
http://www.springer.de/cgi-bin/bag_generate.pl?ISBN=3-540-41952-7
To some degree, my paper is a rehash of issues already covered in my
previous exceptions papers (1985/1990), but it is a legitimately
distinct paper from the others, containing some new material and
what I hope are also new perspectives.
Springer-Verlag didn't compensate me monetarily for the writing of or
use of this paper, and when I saw the draconian publishing agreement
they wanted me to then sign, which required me to yield all my rights
to them in exchange for mere publication and some sort of discount on
the purchase of their books, I told them I'd rather not be published
and that I'd just throw the paper directly up onto the web instead.
(I guess they're used to dealing with people who so desperately need
to get "officially" published that they will sign away all their
rights in exchange for just that. I used to be such a person, but
fortunately no longer. Thank goodness for the web--maybe the time
when publishers can so mercilessly control your rights will just pass
altogether.) After some back and forth, we finally settled on me
letting them publish it under a non-exclusive license that still
entitles me to web it if I want to, but out of politeness, rather than
contractual requirement, I said I'd try to keep it off the web for the
first year so as not to compete with their initial book sales. If
someone reminds me, I'll put it online for web readers to check out
next spring.
Meanwhile, the hardcopy book looks to have some interesting stuff in
it that some of you might want to check out. (No, I'm not compensated
for endorsing it either, so this is not a commercial post.) I just got
my complimentary copy in the mail today and it looked like an
interesting set of topics, so I figured I'd mention it here in case
any one of us still reads things written on dead trees... but also
just so any educators looking for an advanced comparative languages
teaching text might know there's something out there that mentions
Lisp for purposes other than to mention how funny the parens are or to
show how interpreted languages work or any of those other awful things
that Lisp usually gets mentioned for.
I've often said that I think the big advances in getting an idea out
(Lisp, in this case, but the thought is more general) come not from
publishing a whole book on the idea (which often the non-believers
will just religiously decline to buy) but rather from many occasions
of getting a small bit of an idea into a general book so it's harder
not to buy on religious grounds, and so that takes people a little by
surprise. Of course, no single such occasion counts as a big advance,
but it hopefully still adds up. We'll see.