The great inventor John McCarthy (1927 – 2011) now has an official posthumous website: Project JMC. Don’t miss his fascinating (though little-known) political essays!

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Holmes: “That was the curious incident.” – “Silver Blaze” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) Yesterday, I heard a lecture […]

Here is a somewhat dumb example of the kind of thing one can do with Stierlitz.  Let’s say that you have some memory-mapped I/O ports in your system architecture, which you would like to test without having a working CPU design of any kind loaded into your FPGA. The Xilinx ML501 board includes a Tianma-TM162, […]

The tool described in this post may be helpful to other ab initio machine-architecture developers.  If any exist.  The rest of Loper will remain in my private code repository, because it is not a collaborative project. Meet Stierlitz [1], perhaps the world’s strangest bus analyzer.  For basic use, it requires no software at all on […]

To stave off the never-ending questions — variations on the theme of “Where is Loper? Why the wait?” I would like to confess the following: I live a double life! I spend my days… working! For money!  So that I can eat. Here is my current commercial project. It is a laboratory robotics controller, based […]

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. […]

A giant fell. And circus pyramids of idiot midgets make cargo-cult noises. Sniveling trendoids, have you run out of crocodile tears yet? And his “Maxwell’s Equations of Software”?  How many have even heard of, much less understood them? They will be remembered long after the last idiot shiny toy maker has closed up shop. They […]

Looking for an inexpensive, robust Lisp system?  Consider this one: Tried it?  Not satisfied? Well, don’t blame me: it meets all of the basic qualifications for “Lispiness”: Does not hide the abstract syntax tree from programmers. Does not force a non-modifiable syntax on programmers. Does not impose an arbitrary order of sub-expression evaluation on programmers. […]

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 […]