Ah, Clojure. The nice, clean replacement for Common Lisp — as some would have you believe. I haven’t forgotten about you. Clojure is a nice, clean replacement for Common Lisp only if thumbs are nice, clean replacements for cars. But wait, we’re dealing with something more than a mere lightweight hitchhiker on the JVM: “…Clojure’s […]
Original source
Tim Daly on Symbolics and the elimination of the Compile-Pray-Debug Cycle: “The Symbolics machine (its kittens all the way down…) gave me the insight that one of the most important parts of programming is the time it takes to “close the loop”. Start from the point of failure, find the failure in source code, fix […]
Tim Daly of Axiom artfully debunks Steve Yegge’s infamous “Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp”: “I am currently working in Java to re-implement an algorithm I prototyped in lisp. If I replace all of the required curly-braces and semicolons in Java with parens it turns out that the Java program has more parens than the […]
Better screen shots from other people: Ralf Moeller Rainer Joswig
When Google buys ITA, their first order of business will be: its de-Lisping. As described here, for example. The temptation is simply irresistible. And yet the famous travel search engine will continue to work! However, its feature set will be permanently ossified. The latter will ensure a slow death-by-irrelevancy, even if the (likely inevitable) creeping […]
Erik Naggum died slightly more than a year ago. I have never met the man in the flesh, and yet he is the one person who had most often and most radically re-shaped my opinions at their core, solely through the printed word – not only on the subject of computer programing, but on every […]
All of my Nock/Urbit explorations will now live here.
Here is a very simple Common Lisp compiler [1] of Nock, C. Yarvin’s elegant systems language. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; *************************** define reader macros *************************** (eval-when (:load-toplevel :execute) (defmacro char-macro (ch &body body) `(set-macro-character ,ch #'(lambda (stream char) (declare (ignore char)) ,@body))) ; define syntax of N-expression (char-macro #\[ (reduce #'(lambda (&rest exp) (if (functionp (car exp)) […]
One critic, echoing the voices of thousands, asks: “Surely if Lisp makes a programmer N times more efficient, then it would be easy to study scientifically. Have there been any studies comparing productivity?” I wish I could reply with the immortal words of Babbage. But alas I cannot. Sadly, I can indeed “apprehend the kind […]
