@amoroso AI (and #Lisp history) in the new book by Masayuki Ida: "A Narrative History of Artificial Intelligence, The Perpetual Frontier of Information Technology"
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.
So I found a situation where emacs -Q runs a loop 60x slower than my personal Doom Emacs config!
Any #emacs#lisp wizard who might have an idea why? It's as if it's garbage-collecting for a whole minute. It's not the loop itself that's slow, because it actually completes all iterations, and only then does Emacs hang.
@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.
This is interesting but not new. Max Bernstein published two blog post series on implementing Lisp, one on writing an interpreter in OCaml and the other on a compiler in C.
"La programmazione è difficile. Chiunque dica il contrario sta cercando di farvi sentire inferiori a lui o di vendervi qualcosa. Nel caso di molti linguaggi di programmazione "facili da imparare", si dà il caso che siano vere entrambe le cose. Ma voi non siete qui per linguaggi di scripting inefficienti, glorificati e a gratificazione immediata [...]"
A weird thing about being 50 is that there are programming languages that I've used regularly for longer than some of the software developers I work with have been alive. I first wrote BASIC code in the 1980s. The first time I wrote an expression evaluator--a fairly standard programming puzzle or homework--was in 1990. I wrote it in Pascal for an undergraduate homework assignment. I first wrote perl in the early 1990s, when it was still perl 4.036 (5.38.2 now). I first wrote java in 1995-ish, when it was still java 1.0 (1.21 now). I first wrote scala, which I still use for most things today, in 2013-ish, when it was still scala 2.8 (3.4.0 now). At various times I've been "fluent" in 8086 assembly, BASIC, C, Pascal, perl, python, java, scala; and passable in LISP/Scheme, Prolog, old school Mathematica, (early days) Objective C, matlab/octave, and R. I've written a few lines of Fortran and more than a few lines of COBOL that I ran in a production system once. I could probably write a bit of Haskell if pressed but for some reason I really dislike its syntax so I've never been enthusiastic about learning it well. I've experimented with Clean, Flix, Curry, Unison, Factor, and Joy and learned bits and pieces of each of those. I'm trying to decide whether I should try learning Idris, Agda, and/or Lean. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a few languages. Bit of 6502 assembly long ago. Bit of Unix/Linux shell scripting languages (old enough to have lived and breathed tcsh before switching to bash; I use fish now mostly).
When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.
I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.
I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:
Leggendo il libro Aggiustare il mondo di Giovanni Ziccardi ho scoperto che inizialmente Reddit fu concepito in Common Lisp e che in una fase successiva, su suggerimento di Aron, fu riscritto in Python per vari motivi.
Facendo delle ricerche, ho trovato il repo con il codice e anche il post degli sviluppatori in cui argomentano questa scelta. Molto interessante!
MakerLisp Machine is a Lisp and CP/M single board computer with a 50 MHz eZ80 and up to 16 MB RAM. It runs a Lisp on bare metal system as well as CP/M 2.2. The Lisp dialect is a blend of Common Lisp, Scheme, and C.
I used to own a stack of boxes of vintage Byte magazine issues from 78-82 as I wanted physical copies of the #smalltalk and #lisp articles (which at the time were not scanned/available). Anyway I couldn’t help but read almost all of them, mainly for the ads! Also some great #forth articles. Ultimately it was incredibly informative to learn about the hype cycle of tech. So every time I hear about crypto or LLM shit I imagine it (well what ever the aphantasia version of imagining is) in terms of half page glossy over produced vintage byte magazine ads.
@screwtape if I were to learn a lisp (at this stage mostly out of curiosity) which one would you recommend? Is there any other advice I'm likely to need?
Way more. The Xerox Dandelions I started on were of the order of one DEC MIPS, and had 4 megabytes of main memory. This eight year old home made box I'm sitting in front of now has 86,000 times the performance, and 16,000 times the memory. Yes, it is extraordinary (and very nice).