Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Or, why is the most frequently-asked question on every web programming framework mailing list, “How do I serve a static page?” Alan J. Perlis’ epigram on programming #54: Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy. Beware indeed. Abstraction isn’t free and the #1 sin of programming…
This is just an random idea that popped into my head. Tell me if I’m crazy. Is there enough distinction between literals in code and values generated at runtime? In other words, what should be the difference between this: x = “Hello, World!” and this (syntax made up): x = new String(“Hello, World!”) In general,…
Consider the following simple bit of mathematical notation: the TeX code that draws it: \sqrt[4]{\frac{x^2+1}{x-1}} and the same thing in an S-expresion syntax like Common Lisp: (exp (/ (+ (exp x 2) 1)) (- x 1)) (/ 1 4)) and in a typical function-call notation like Python: pow((x**2+1)/(x-1), 1/4) I know which one I’d prefer…
Why indeed?
A small pet peeve: the use of goto in written English instead of go to. Is this the legacy of BASIC?
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 of numbering lists starting with zero. I think the difficulty I have with zero-indexing is…
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…
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…
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…