Tag Archives: Lisp

Clojure and Scheme Compared

Posted on 2021-03-06 by jcs

As I’ve said before, I’m sometimes tempted to take up Clojure but have always been put off by its reliance on the JVM. Last year, Mike Zamansky posted a couple of videos (1, 2) on using Clojure for the Advent … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: What Could Have Been

Posted on 2020-07-03 by jcs

Here’s some red meat for all you parentheses haters and Blub users: Society if Lisp had been industry standard since 1958 pic.twitter.com/cRsaDTMPmP — julesh (@_julesh_) July 2, 2020 It’s probably a little hyperbolic but it feels right to us Lisp … Continue reading →

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How To Start a Common Lisp Project

Posted on 2020-02-12 by jcs

As I mentioned the other day, I haven’t been using Common Lisp much lately so I was a little rusty when I wrote my A Palindrome Predicate Coda post. It’s not that I forgot the Lisp itself, that’s sufficiently like … Continue reading →

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A Palindrome Predicate Coda

Posted on 2020-01-07 by jcs

As I wrote yesterday, I upgraded my Common Lisp environment to SBCL 2.0 so of course I wanted to try it out. Writing Lisp programs in the excellent Slime environment that Emacs provides is truly a pleasure that I haven’t … Continue reading →

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SBCL 2.0.0

Posted on 2020-01-06 by jcs

Steel Bank Common Lisp has a new version out. I haven’t been writing much Common Lisp lately so I haven’t kept the software up to date. SBCL makes a new release every month and I always compile from source so … Continue reading →

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Car and Cdr versus Head and Tail

Posted on 2019-12-08 by jcs

Right after parentheses, one of the things about Lisp that non-Lispers—and even some Lispers—like to complain about are the names of the two functions car and cdr. A common understanding is that car returns the first entry of a list … Continue reading →

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Can A Programming Language Be Too Powerful?

Posted on 2019-08-04 by jcs

After writing my post on Emacs and Igors, I reread Rudolf Winestock’s The Lisp Curse that Done mentioned in his article on why Emacs users are like the Igors. Winestock’s article, in turn, mentioned another that I’ve also read before, … Continue reading →

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The Dream Draws Nearer

Posted on 2019-04-21 by jcs

If you’re a hardcore Emacser or Lisper, you’ve probably always drooled over the famous space-cadet keyboard. Just think, you’d have keys for all four bucky bits, not to mention a multitude of other keys with no apparent use if you … Continue reading →

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The Loneliness of the Lisp Programmer

Posted on 2019-01-17 by jcs

This struck me as funny. And all too true.

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A Road to Common Lisp

Posted on 2018-10-19 by jcs

I had years of programming experience before I learned Common Lisp—or any Lisp, for that matter—and I’ve always regretted it. Lisp teaches you new ways of thinking about programming and every programmer should be familiar with it even if they … Continue reading →

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