Category Archives: Programming

The Y-Combinator

Posted on 2012-11-24 by jcs

Jim Weirich, of Neo gave a really nice talk on The Y-Combinator at RubyConf2012. Given the venue, the examples are, of course, in Ruby but you should have no difficulty following them: I know no Ruby at all but was … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 1 Comment

Why We Use IDEs

Posted on 2012-11-23 by jcs

Wille Faler over at recursivity.com has a nice post on IDEs and why we need them. His take is that if you need an IDE it’s because of shortcomings in the language you’re using. He has in mind, of course, … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 1 Comment

Some Common Sense on OOP

Posted on 2012-11-15 by jcs

A few days ago, I ran across an interesting and commonsensical article on OOP by James Hague over at programming in the twenty-first century. In it he says that while OOP is sometimes useful, it’s not a fundamental particle of … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 3 Comments

Common Lisp Naming Conventions

Posted on 2012-11-11 by jcs

Over at the newly redesigned Common Lisp Wiki, CLiki, they have an excellent page on Common Lisp naming conventions. Most people that have done a non-trivial amount of Lisp programming will be at least dimly aware of many of these … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Learning Elisp

Posted on 2012-11-06 by jcs

Xah Lee has an excellent post on learning how to program in Emacs Lisp1. His idea is to start with your favorite programming mode, disable it, and program your own. Begin with just doing syntax coloring and then slowly add … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Google Common Lisp Style Guide

Posted on 2012-10-15 by jcs

Google has made their Common Lisp Style Guide—presumably from ITA—available to the public. As with any style guide, almost everyone will find something to disagree with but by and large it appears to be a very reasonable compendium of best … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Chibi Scheme

Posted on 2012-10-13 by jcs

I just ran across an update announcement for Chibi Scheme, a small Scheme intended to be used as an extension language for C programs. It supports the small R7RS language and can be configured at compile time to produce a … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Reader Macros

Posted on 2012-10-09 by jcs

J.V. Toups over at Dorophone has a nice, short introduction to Common Lisp reader macros. The conventional wisdom is that it’s best to avoid reader macros when you can and the use cases that Toups examines probably fall into that … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

More Common Lisp Tweets

Posted on 2012-10-07 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis has announced a “massive reorganization” of his Common Lisp tweets collection. He’s also added 200 about 70 new tweets to the collection for a total of almost 200. In the past, I’ve recommended going to his site for … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | 1 Comment

SBCL 1.1.0

Posted on 2012-10-04 by jcs

SBCL 1.1.0 has been released and is available from the SBCL Download page. Although they have brought the OS X binary up to date, I chose to compile from source. The compilation ran without difficulty and as far as I … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment