In my ignorance, I didn't have faith in #LISP because it is a very old programming language, and in my circle of acquaintances and friends, I never saw anyone using it. Behold, as almost always, I was wrong!!! What magnificent language. It's no wonder that #Clojure is there!
The July 1985 issue of Computer Language magazine reviewed a dozen Lisp implementations for MS-DOS.
It's a good overview of the state of Lisp on microcomputers in the mid 1980s, the years of the early work that led to ANSI Common Lisp. I knew only a few of these implementations. Interestingly, some of the Lisps were based on Interlisp and featured structure editors.
At work, I am #FrontEnd engineer, but after it, I spend my time with #Clojure. Today my friend, #Python engineer, wrote about purely C-like syntax that it looks like #Lisp. I couldn’t stand this and sent him a picture of some Clojure code, which indeed looks like Lisp. I received the following image back from him. So the question is, should we talk about the brackets-blindness symptoms here?😃
@simon_brooke Hey buddy, checked out #Scheme/#Scsh yesterday, super intriguing stuff. Actually, I've been digging into #Lisp and its dialects lately. Got curious about why there are so many dialects, you know?
Recently dabbled in #Clojure, which got me looking at Lisp in a new light. Unlike #Haskell, which is awesome for sure, #Lisp has been out of academia and in the market for quite a while... found it pretty cool.
@lobocode very old language, relatively easy to implement. And much used in computer science education, hence lots of variants. But mainly, age. Every site which installed #Lisp 1.5 ended up with a variant which was subtly incompatible with all the others... and that was sixty five years ago.
Explorative programming #lisp I'm very much liking a lot of the ideas here. It addresses the hard question of how to help people tackle complicated problems, rather than trying (impossibly) to make all problems simple (and then inevitably getting tied up in workaround knots) https://blog.dziban.net/essays/explorative-programming/
Malt: A Deep Learning Framework for Racket by Dan Friedman and Anurag Mendhekar
We discuss the design of a #DeepLearning toolkit, Malt, that has been built for Racket. Originally designed to support the pedagogy of The Little Learner—A Straight Line to Deep Learning, it is used to build deep neural networks with a minimum of fuss using tools like higher-order automatic differentiation and rank polymorphism. The natural, functional style of AI programming that Malt enables can be extended to much larger, practical applications. We present a roadmap for how we hope to achieve this so that it can become a stepping stone to allow #Lisp / #Scheme / #Racket to reclaim the crown of being the language for Artificial Intelligence (perhaps!).
A little over a year ago, originally due to an interest in the deeper history of #compilers, I started diving deep into the #Talmud, studying #Aramaic, #gematria, and doing #DafYomi etc in what has become my deepest engagement with the rabbinic corpus yet -- the Talmud isn't a compiler but rather an extensible interpreter, compiled by compilers over the course of many centuries (build times have gotten significantly faster, my G-d), with novel extensions in the form of rabbinic commentary, glossia and the like being added nearly every century by publishers competing to compile the most elegant editions (Vilna Shaws being paradigmatic). And through studying Talmud and the greater body of rabbinic literature I've found myself encountering #magic/sorcery occasionally, and I just gotta say -- the #SICP metaphor of programming as pure magic, with the #hacker as a sorcerer, goes insanely deep when you start to dig into it.
I did not consider Lisp macros as a means to inline code for efficiency. But while I read "Common LISPcraft" this is one of the first (and a very good) example of why to use macros. It's a great book - also because of the many annotations left by the former owner 🙂
This series of posts by @sjl is a true gem worth bookmarking. It describes a CHIP-8 emulator in Common Lisp whose techniques are applicable to other systems.
But the series is also a Lisp software design resource in disguise, as it presents a Domain-Specific Language for concisely and clearly describing machine architectures and instruction sets.
In my quest for an easier emacs on ramp, I made an org file for adding templated elisp source block sections to itself, which tangles to an elisp file, to be loaded on startup.
I was cursious about Lucid Common Lisp but its remaining documentation is not under Lucid at @bitsavers because, of course, it's under Sun.
The product was a Sun branded implementation licensed from Lucid. It featured some interesting historical peculiarities such as the Flavors OOP system instead of CLOS, which in the mid 1980s was yet to come to the ANSI Common Lisp standardization effort.
I read this interesting essay on how @dziban approaches programming and an exploratory programming tool he's building in Common Lisp.
He explains why exploratory programming in Lisp is the process that best matches his development style, identifies major sources of rigidity of traditional file based environments and languages, and outlines his tool which has similarities with Interlisp's residential environment.
I should be banned from reading/watching anything about #CommonLisp (or any #Lisp language, for that matter). I've read a nice, short article yesterday, then I watched an inspiring talk, then I spend an evening playing with some #Racket code, and now I just want to effing drop everything and learn CL and Racket properly.