Category Archives: Programming

The Joys of Java

Posted on 2013-08-24 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis retweeted this pithy observation from Branimir Karadžić about a developer’s life in the Java world. Evil of me, I know, but sometimes the truth is too screamingly funny to ignore.

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Essential Elisp Functions

Posted on 2013-08-19 by jcs

Emacs Lisp has a reputation for being difficult to learn but as I’ve said many times, the main difficulty—especially for someone already familiar with Lispy languages—is learning the text-editing specific functions. Most of the rest is just standard Lisp. As … Continue reading →

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Elisp Namespaces

Posted on 2013-08-06 by jcs

Nic Ferrier has posted an interesting proposal to bring namespaces to Emacs Lisp. His ideas seem both reasonable and doable. One of Elisp’s big problems is the lack of a namespace system. We end up with a bunch of nasty … Continue reading →

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Tail Call Optimization in Lisp Implementations

Posted on 2013-07-31 by jcs

Early on in my Lisp education, I learned Scheme and became enamored with using recursion as a primary iteration strategy. It’s hard to avoid this in Scheme because it doesn’t have any other general recursion mechanisms besides do. In Common … Continue reading →

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Applying defadvice to Several Functions at Once

Posted on 2013-07-19 by jcs

One of the distinguishing—and most useful—features of Lisp is the macro. Sadly, we don’t often see them discussed in the Emacs blogosphere so I was happy to see Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux give a beautiful example of macro … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.1.9 Is Out

Posted on 2013-07-10 by jcs

The latest version of Steel Bank Common Lisp, 1.1.9, is out and available at the usual place. As always, the system built and tested without problems on my MacBook Pro and iMac. The big news this month is that SBCL … Continue reading →

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Multiparadigm Elisp

Posted on 2013-07-04 by jcs

I got a pointer to an interesting Wilfred Hughes post from this Magnar Sveen tweet. The post, Adventures in Multi Paradigm Programming, looks at the power and flexibility of Emacs Lisp. One often hears how Elisp is a crappy language … Continue reading →

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Byte Compiling Elisp

Posted on 2013-07-01 by jcs

I used to obsess about byte compiling my Elisp files but then I realized that The only thing I ever byte compiled was my init.el and updates to the packages I load. Byte compiling your startup file makes no appreciable … Continue reading →

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An Elisp Mystery

Posted on 2013-06-25 by jcs

Over at the Emacs Reddit, wadcann posts a nice idea. The problem is to have abbreviations that touch their surrounding text. The canonical example is punctuation like the em-dash: Many national security professionals—those in the CIA, NSA, and similar… You … Continue reading →

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Lisp Hackers

Posted on 2013-06-22 by jcs

For some time Vsevolod Dyomkin has been running interviews with Lisp hackers on his blog, Lisp, The Universe and Everything. Irreal has featured many of these in the past. Now Dyomkin has gathered those interviews and assembled them into a … Continue reading →

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