A favorite conundrum of many Lisp aficionados is why the language appears to languish in disuse.  Talk of cultural problems, “the library question” (which usually boils down to nonsensical circular reasoning), too many parentheses, and other absurdities simply dances around the blindingly obvious explanation – one which is able to make sense not only of […]

Historical note (Jan. 7, 2014) – This ancient post still gets several hundred to a thousand page views per month! And, unsurprisingly, the Clojure community still replies to the criticisms therein with… only insults. This is what comes of a product fundamentally brain-damaged at birth. I find Clojure revolting. It is the most explicit to […]

“Throughout my life I have known people who were born with silver spoons in their mouths. You know the ones: grew up in a strong community, went to good public or private schools, were able to attend a top undergraduate school like Harvard or Caltech, and then were admitted to the best graduate schools. Their […]

Arc has made quite an impression on me. Implementing it on the bare metal feels like a worthy and tempting goal. On the other hand, I am saddened by the invincibility of the “programs as plain ASCII streams” dogma even among supposed iconoclasts.

The linked list is a less-than-welcome guest on modern machine architectures, for reasons which are well-known. I am trying to determine if the difference between current cache and main memory speeds (as well as other concerns) have made CDR coding attractive again. It has traditionally been considered a no-no on any machine lacking hardware-assisted tagging. […]