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.
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.
Another lisp (lisps sometimes feel like weed: Leave a computing environment unpoliced for some for some time, sure as hell, a lisp has parachuted in and taken root)
What's beyond me, though, why almost everybody who makes their own (un-common, non-scheme) lisp, insists practically on their own vocabulary for defining (e.g.) functions. They avoid the time honored defun, the logical define and even the non- mutilated define-function. Instead they use defn.
How was your weekend? I love a rainy weekend in the Pacific Northwest corner of America, as it relieves my guilt of doing what I want to do ... staying inside. I read a little, wrote a little, hacked a little ... even played a classic #videogame from the 90s (Curse of Monkey Island on #ScummVM).
I also did a little math. Yeah, been thinking of taking the "Yes, and.." dice mechanics used for luck rolls in #rpg games (not sure who came up with it first), and fusing it with Mythic GM Emulator's Fate Chart, popular with the #solorpg crowd. Since I'm always playing with my notes written in #emacs on the screen, I hacked it in #lisp. Shared the details in case anyone wanted to do something similar in their favorite programming language.
;; Getting rid of explicit indexing was just step one.
-- After a few days/months/years, I now realize that it is more important and less buggy if I think only of the function to call (and whether I want to end up with a new (maybe pruned) collection, a single thing, or "both" (that's how I think of scans))
@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.