Mencius Moldbug’s Urbit system appears to be public!  Take the time to read his introductory materials – you will not regret it.   Any regular reader of this site will probably take some interest in Urbit. While I disagree with many of Moldbug’s fundamental design decisions, I believe that his is the first modern ab initio […]

Douglas Engelbart – perhaps the last of the great American inventors – is dead. The newspapers are keen to remind everyone that Engelbart invented the computer mouse, but they are largely silent on the matter of his having personally created almost every one of the concepts we think of as part of the standard human-computer […]

At present, I have taken a break from the hardware aspects of Loper – to work on “Jupiter,” a Linux-based emulator of the system’s essential aspects.  (Think QEMU.) Jupiter is unlikely to be of any practical use to anyone but myself.  However, at some point, I will make it public, so that interested persons who […]

Loper’s I2C controller is working.  The SPD ROM on the DDR2 RAM stick attached to the Xilinx ML-501 board is read correctly.  The video controller is working (though not feature-complete.)  The DDR2 SDRAM controller is still under testing, as is the cache SRAM controller.  The gigabit Ethernet controller is not yet complete. I should probably […]

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 […]

Readers who enjoyed “The Five Types of Technological Standard” will like “Software Bugs and Scientific Progress” by John Regehr. The best conceivable advice to the computer industry would be: “Revisit assumptions.” But of course this is just the kind of advice least likely to be taken.

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)) […]