Tag Archives: Lisp
More Clojure Love
I dropped by the Java Users’ Group meeting last week since Rich Hickey was there to talk about Clojure. I expected a bit of carping from the Java guys, and at first they were all “efficiency this” and “security that.” … Continue reading
The Problem With Common Lisp
… as explained by Sir Kenny, From: Ken Tilton Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:53:07 -0400 Subject: Re: Newbie FAQ #2: Where’s the GUI? Jonathan Gardner wrote: > I know this is a FAQ, but I still don’t … Continue reading
Arc
The most famous piece of Lisp-related vaporware is vapor no longer: Arc has been released. After paging through the tutorial, I’m a bit underwhelmed. It looks like just a bunch of syntactic sugar implemented on top of Scheme. Clojure is … Continue reading
Critical Mass
Dan Weinreb posted common Complaints About Common Lisp. My personal complaint is in there — the lack of libraries that are well-documented and regularly updated. I think it’s a critical mass problem: so few people are using Common Lisp in … Continue reading
Clojure: A Lisp Worth Talking About
A couple nights ago I walked down to LispNYC in the East Village to hear Rich Hickey talk about Clojure, his new Lisp-like language. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. Another Lisp? Ho hum. I’m sure it’s very clever … Continue reading
Beyond Syntax
From a 1995 paper on intentional programming: “Present day syntax had [sic] been predicated on a character stream that could have been input from punch cards, or teletypes.” Exactly! Why are we still working in a punch-card manner on million-pixel … Continue reading
Ruby vs. Lisp
I’m certainly not the first to do this, but I felt like writing it. Comparing Ruby and Common Lisp: Syntax: Advantage, Common Lisp. No contest here. Ruby’s syntax is ugly, with all those ends hanging around and the { |var| … Continue reading
Defining Eval … In a Library
I was at LispNYC last night listening to Anton van Straaten discuss his work on R6RS, the new Scheme standard. One surprising change from R5RS is that eval is defined in a library. Eval, in a library? Holy scopes! The … Continue reading
Intentional Programming
In one of my first posts, I asked “Why do we speak of programming languages instead of programming notation?” My thought was, and still is, that code in any existing programming language is just one possible representation of an abstract … Continue reading
Chaining Function Calls
I like Lisp’s prefix syntax. It’s consistent, has natural structure, and makes code-manipulation macros possible. But it’s not always the easiest to read or write. For example, I often want to apply several successive transformations to the same chunk of … Continue reading