Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
I’m currently enjoying Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. I’m only about half-way through it, and despite some inital scepticism I find his data more than a little convincing. In the future Kurzweil sets out, everything will be a form of information. The bodies we inhabit and the world we interact with will be dynamically…
So I have been dropped from Planet Lisp, scarcely two months after being added. I wonder if that’s a record of some kind? Apparently, the maintainer found my tone too didactic and my knowledge too lacking. Fair criticisms both, but I meant no harm. I’m certainly not trying to set myself up as a Lisp…
Hello, Lisp world! This is my first released Common Lisp code. Perl in Lisp is a Common Lisp interface to the Perl 5 API. It allows you to run a Perl interpreter embedded inside Lisp and evaluate Perl code. It does not require any C wrapper code — the API definitions are done with CFFI…
Apple’s new Dashboard Widgets bother me. Not in a usability sense — they look quite useful, especially if they can be brought in and out of view quickly. What bothers me is that every widget looks completely different. Reading about user interfaces, the one clear mantra appears to be “consistency, consistency, consistency.” The Dashboard has…
Or, How the Lisp-n Shall Inherit the Earth Humans like to name things. Like ourselves, Homo sapiens, Latin for “Primate that has taken leave of its senses.” Then there are engineers. Engineers like to name things too. Like SCSI, pronounced “scuzzy.” Or WYSIWYG, pronounced “wizzy-wig.” Or TTY, pronounced (I couldn’t believe this at first) “titty.”…
I think nearly all computer users can be divided into three broad categories based on the way they think about computers. The vast majority of computer users are application-oriented. They have training and experience exclusively with commercial software. They understand concepts peculiar to computers such as files, folders, saving, and deleting. They live in a…
Perl was the first programming language I really liked, the first language that made programming fun. Perl has three basic types: “scalars” for atomic values, arrays for ordered sets, and hash tables for unordered sets. (Yes, there are others, but those are the popular ones.) I quickly discovered that these three types can be combined…
The just-released Dabble DB is, to my mind, one of the most innovative pieces of software since the spreadsheet. It’s a relational database that can figure out your data relations for you. It’s a spreadsheet that can run structured queries on your data. It’s an on-line calendar with RSS feeds. It’s a web form processor…
Ah, the loop, so fundamental to programming it’s hard to imagine a single program without one. After all, what’s the use of calculating just one thing? Usually you have a big pile of things you want to calculate, which is why you need a computer in the first place. I think one of the quickest…
A desktop that actually behaves like a real desk. I don’t know if I’d want to use it all day, but it sure looks like fun.