I'm doing some thinking about whether to learn common #lisp or #scheme and create tutorials for others at the beginning like myself.
The focus would not be on syntax or an encyclopedia of available commands or external libraries. It would be about "thinking" and decomposing problems into algorithms.
So far I like that scheme is tiny, has pretty much one syntax, leaving us undistracted from the problem to solve.
Anyway, if anybody's got any links related to SECD machines, or implementing VMs in general and/or lisp implementations for them, be sure to send it my way #lisp
I didn't know much about John Allen, the author of the classic 1978 book Anatomy of LISP. This post by a researcher who knew him well tells a bit about Allen, his work, and his passion for Lisp and computing.
I didn't realize ACM makes available the full-ish archive of the LISP Pointers journal SIGPLAN published from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. It contains most of the papers of most of the issues, an historical treasure of practical value.
The #game jam co-organized by Dave Thompson, CTO at @spritelyinst, starts today and are an excellent opportunity to test-drive the #Spritely#Hoot project's #Guile to #WebAssembly facilities.
Get inspired by last year's jam, and join the 10-day event..
There's now a long thread about what would make Lisp more successful. Nice idea, but it quickly turned into a good example of why this will never happen and why Lisp rarely fascinates new developers. I do not know if the term "lisplaining" exists already, but the thred is mosly lisplaining now. #lisp
In this 1994 paper Richard Waters acknowledged the momentum of C and its implications for the Lisp ecosystem. He laid out a stretegy for the survival and growth of Lisp focused on the development of a critical mass of reusable software.
Three decades later the Lisp community has come a long way but, as Waters concluded back then:
"As long as we are a vibrant community [...] Lisp will hold its own."
👆 I posted the initial code and some notes on Insphex, a new hex dump tool in Common Lisp I'm writing under the Medley Interlisp environment. The program is similar to the Linux command hexdump.
Very excited about this book! Conway’s Game of Life is what got me out of blubberism almost three decades ago as I implemented it in php and started looking into more succinct implementations which brought me to #apl, #lisp and so #forth.
It's now available the paper of the Medley talk Andrew Sengul gave at the European Lisp Symposium 2024. It outlines the history of Interlisp, introduces the Medley revival project, and presents the main features and facilities of the environment.
@amoroso#lisp#interlisp#commonlisp
Thanks for the pointer! That's a very well written paper giving an excellent overview of the Interlisp revival project.