Tag Archives: Lisp
The Path of Least Work
Well, a new year, and (finally) a new post. In the past two weeks I have undertaken a complete rewrite of Project Posner from Common Lisp to Ruby on Rails. Now, before the Lispniks descend upon me with their sharp … Continue reading
Best Programming Languages at UnSpun
Amazon has a beta up of an interesting little app called UnSpun. It’s a way to create and vote on “best of” lists for any subject. It’s a little like Reddit, but less news-oriented. Ruby currently leads Best Programming Language … Continue reading
Not So Slow
Perhaps I was premature worrying about how slow Ruby is. John Wiseman was benchmarking Montezuma, his Common Lisp port of Ferret/Lucene, and found out in the process that Ferret is 10 times faster than Java Lucene! As he says, Ferret … Continue reading
Ruby More Memory-Efficient than Lisp?
I continue to sweat (see previous entry) over the question of language choice for future iterations of Project Posner (and some as-yet-unnamed similar projects). Ruby on Rails is the obvious mainstream choice, mainstream at least compared to Lisp. But a … Continue reading
Borrowability
The first draft of Project Posner was written in Common Lisp. I thought it would be fun to see how Common Lisp fared as a language for doing heavy text processing with a web front end. It worked well, and … Continue reading
Project Posner: first look
Been too busy with work and class to post much, but here’s a link for all the IANALs out there: Project Posner. It’s an on-line database collecting the case opinions of Richard A. Posner, judge on the 7th Circuit Court … Continue reading
Breadth-first and Depth-first Searching
I’m playing some more with the early chapters of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, looking at basic tree search techniques for the 8-puzzle. I wrote simple breadth-first and depth-first search algorithms for this puzzle in Common Lisp. Here’s the code. … Continue reading
Who Needs Data Structures?
Ran across an interesting remark in a discussion of Microsoft hiring interviews: If I remember, a lot of MIT people back in the 70s broke the computer world into the Lisp and non-Lisp data typers. The Lisp folk took a … Continue reading
Ruminations on Planet Lisp
To clarify for some respondants to Voted Off the Planet: As far as I know, the decision to remove my blog from Planet Lisp was not made collectively by readers but solely by the site’s maintainer. As is apparent from … Continue reading
Zeroth Post!
A Usenet posting sent me to a short article by Edsger W. Dijkstra titled Why numbering should start at zero. Now, I have never used a programming language that wasn’t zero-indexed (like Fortran), but neither have I adopted the habit … Continue reading