Dear Cretins, You will not succeed in guessing the password for this site. Kindly make better use of your botnet (e.g. mine Bitcoin) and go away. Yours, -Stanislav

Your kitchen is alive with vermin! Who is to blame? The cruel forces of nature? Or, might it be you – the fellow who scattered delicious crumbs everywhere; spilled honey a thousand times without picking up a mop once; and kept a mountain of old newspapers around for rodents to chew into nest liner? Your […]

“The enlightened, disciplined mind is the holiest of holies, a wonder among wonders. Upon the Earth – a grain of sand in the Universe, man is on the order of one-billionth of the smallest magnitude… And yet this particle in your mind’s eye, that lives but for sixty or so trips of the Earth around […]

Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is “an instrument whose music is ideas.” This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown.  To continue with this analogy, let’s imagine that you were a child who […]

Edit: The moral of the story, for those who didn’t get it, is that a serious programming environment ought to be an intimately-personalized affair, like eyeglasses or a hearing aid.  And that existing solutions fall laughably short of this goal.  Emacs, the supposed counter-example, is conceptually heavy and unbearably complex for everyday “civilian” use – […]

Update: Click here if you would like to try HyperCard yourself. I was a Hypercard child – though our friendship was brief. Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas.  The day’s lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might […]

You’ve met the Steam Lisp.  Now meet vitrium flexile, the Roman Lisp: “… there was an artificer once who made a glass goblet that would not break. So he was admitted to Caesar’s presence to offer him his invention; then, on receiving the cup back from Caesar’s hands, he dashed it down on the floor. […]

Among the advertised features of Apple’s latest OS update, three in particular caught my attention: “auto-save”, which claims to wipe out the abomination of volatile-by-default documents; “versioning”, which claims to introduce document version-control into the Mac’s normal operations; and “resume”, which promises to re-load a user’s work-state whenever an application is re-started. On the surface, […]

Vladimir Sedach explains the purpose of the Lisp macro and comments on some of the reasons for its absence from “modern” programming systems: “I used to like arguing over the Internet about this subject. There are many good technical and management/organizational arguments you can make for and against macros. What I’ve come to realize is […]

How many of your waking hours have you wasted in babysitting machine processes which ought to be entirely hidden and automatic?  In the use of “job-creating” technologies? Next time you find yourself doing so, consider this: “Improvements come in many ways, sometimes after much thought and after many experimental failures. Sometimes they flash upon clever […]