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.
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."
TIL: Function designators in Common Lisp:
(funcall 'foo 0)
(funcall #'foo 0)
Both work, however, if there is a function named FOO in the lexical environment (i.e. via FLET/LABELS), #' (= FUNCTION) will use that while ' (= QUOTE) will always ignore the lexical environment.
👆 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.
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.
Petalisp is an attempt to generate high performance code for parallel computers by JIT-compiling array definitions. It is not a full blown programming language, but rather a carefully crafted extension of Common Lisp that allows for extreme optimization and parallelization.
Exciting news for SBCL users. A coroutine proof-of-concept was created during ELS after-hours in a pub :-) I for once hope, what happened in Vienna, doesn't stay in Vienna.
I'm really digging this pattern in CLOS of extending a class and using :use-reexport in the new package definition to pull in the base class.
It makes code growth and juggling easier. I can extend a class by just changing an import statement, and then if I want to fold that new class code into the base class I can do that, and go back to the old import stanza.
The code that is dealing with the class (base or child) instance can stay untouched.
I have a favor to ask you. Please tell the Lispers there if any of them writes a Common Lisp book I'll be more than happy to buy it, back a kickstarter, spread the voice, and support the author any way I can.
This is just one data point but my hunch is many Lispers are like me.
A few years ago I have created a visual overview of (mostly) Common Lisp related books... Good thing: even the older ones can be useful, given that the core language hasn't changed that much over the last years.
Common Lisp Quick Reference is a nicely designed, comprehensive, and handy Common Lisp cheatsheet. It's available in different PDF versions for printing as a booklet or online browsing, as well as LaTeX source.
@louis
(#veilid is a rust lib that creates a veilid node per application which participates in a network, and gets messages 'to you' to you from the greater network. You publish properties on 'your' node, or it has a torrenting form for larger media items). https://veilid.com
"Being a veilid node" is one page of rust
-> compile to .a
-> put in C
-> #CommonLisp cffi
What do you think about this unconventional private internetworking? I think "the #lisp community" should capture this.
Uncommon opinion (but not necessarily unpopular): I love languages with large standard libraries. I enjoy flipping through the language documentation, scouting for interesting functions or classes that may eventually come in handy.
My favorite large library language is Common Lisp but of course there are many others such as Smalltalk, Python, and Java.