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… an important point here about what a program is. Does it cause action by subjecting a static machine that otherwise does nothing to a list of instructions, or is it static data that is accepting by…
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Above all the wonders of Lisp’s pantheon stand its metalinguistic tools; by their grace have Lisp’s acolytes been liberated from the rigid asceticism of lesser faiths. Thanks to Macro and kin, the jol…
What has speed brought ?
Many good things, to be sure, but more has been omitted. Perhaps Kent Pitman expressed it the best: I want speedups not just to make my same old boring life faster, but to buy me the flexibility to…
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Is JavaScript the new Lisp? I seem to have been blissfully unaware of just how far JavaScript has come over the last decade or so. I wanted to make a foray into mobile app programming (ah ok, nothin…
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I have briefly looked at Arc. It is yet another demonstration of the problem of too strong an ego that cannot live with what somebody else has made. Be it the standard conditionals, nil versus false…
Propagating, artfully
Just came across [this paper] today, and it was super-interesting. (I’m assuming the title is a reference to [an earlier one] by Steele and Sussman). You can read the abstract, or [watch Sussman talk…
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A common analogy for a resistor is a pipe that carries water. The water itself is analogous to electrical charge, the pressure at the input of the pipe is similar to voltage, and the rate of flow of t…
File paths ...
... Seem standardized now, but this was not always so. Here (from cltl2) is the range of ways of specifying a "pathname" that were typical on different systems about 25 years ago. Obviously…
Baktoo: Taking baby steps with generative art
Continuing (or stumbling) along a path to using Common Lisp for stuff I consider fun, I came up with this. As mentioned in the `README`, I need to work on making this more efficient. Stuff I learned…
Programming is like writing
From a comment on Slashdot: My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing. The vast majority of programming is not conceptually difficult (contrary to what a lot of people would ha…
SimAnt
I created a one-file GitHub repo over the weekend for a very trivial simulation I wanted to run. The Readme has more details, but it's basically a way to study the interaction between ants, food…
SDL on OSX
(ql:quickload 'lispbuilder-sdl) worked right away on an ubuntu box, but failed (couldn't find `cocoahelper) when I tried the sam on my Macbook. The fix is to install SDL, then go to ~/quickli…