Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
I don’t much like programming language tutorials. They’re useful for getting the general sense of what a language is all about, but they inevitably elide too many crucial details to teach you how to write a real program. When I got interested in Ruby, I read the on-line version of Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s…
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 Common Lispers in the audience were aghast. Even the Schemers were a tad confused. Anton…
Here’s a question that’s been bugging me for a while: what’s the best way to store information that is a mixture of highly- and loosely-structured data? For example, a collection of documents like Project Posner. Certain attributes of each document like the title, date, and citation fit easily into a normalized relational database model. But…
I used to be a big fan of Perl. It was the first programming language I really liked. I felt like it didn’t get in my way. CPAN was and still is the best collection of open-source libraries ever assembled. Then I got into Ruby, and was very happy with the way it cleaned up…
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 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 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…