Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
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 computational process. Higher-level languages like Lisp are good because they bring the written representation closer…
I’ve just dived into Rails and Ruby in the past couple of months, but I’ve already benefited from it, so here’s my entry in the How has Ruby on Rails made you a better programmer contest. 1. I finally get Model-View-Controller I’ve seen MVC before, once long ago in the Microsoft C++ Foundation Classes,…
I went and got a massage last week. After being relieved of a great deal of muscle tension and no small sum of money, I returned to the spa’s locker room to take a shower. On the wall of the shower stall was hung a sign, about a foot square, printed with large block letters:…
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 text. In Perl, I could use the default variable $_ and then just write a…
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 parenthetical barbs, allow me to explain. The Common Lisp version was never anything more than…
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 by a 7-to-1 margin, not surprising given that the site’s built on Rails. I’m glad…
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 gets help from about 65,000 lines of C code. I’ve heard this before, perhaps not…
I really like LaTeX. So much so that I bought a used copy of the original LaTeX “blue book” just so I could write a class file to print my freshman English papers in MLA format, which requires breaking most of the typesetting rules that make LaTeX output look so professional to begin with. But…
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 part of me really wants to do it in Common Lisp, just to prove I…
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 I’m convinced it made the process easier than it would have been with any other…