Category Archives: Programming

Turning URLs into Org Links

Posted on 2012-09-11 by jcs

Often times when doing research for a blog post I will collect a series of URLs that I could potentially use as a link in the post. Nothing new or exciting there; almost every blogger doubtlessly does the same thing. … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Emacs | 5 Comments

Concurrency with ChanL

Posted on 2012-09-05 by jcs

Stephen Goss over at the zero bit stream has a great post on concurrency in Common Lisp using ChanL. ChanL is a Common Lisp library that implements the Newsqueak concurrency paradigm. Newsqueak was developed by Rob Pike and is described … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Common-lisp | Leave a comment

How I Know I’m a Curmudgeon

Posted on 2012-09-04 by jcs

I agree with every one of these 20 controversial programming opinions. Aside: Does anyone else find it astounding that “vetted” interviewees could not write code to calculate the area of a circle in any language? Or is astounding too weak … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | 1 Comment

Emacs and Bignums

Posted on 2012-09-02 by jcs

Nic Ferrier has a great post on using bignums with Emacs Lisp. Elisp, of course, does not support bignums but Ferrier has a trick: use the Elisp interface to calc, which does support bignums, to make the necessary calculations. Ferrier … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Emacs | Leave a comment

Arguments against `call/cc`

Posted on 2012-08-31 by jcs

Pascal Constanza has a post that points us to an article by Oleg Kiselyow that argues against the call/cc function. Regular readers know that I am an admirer of call/cc so I’m not sure I agree with the idea that … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Scheme | Leave a comment

Some Common Lisp Tip Tweets

Posted on 2012-08-30 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis over at HexstreamSoft has a very nice set of tweets on Common Lisp tips. For example, 【Meta+x】 slime-cheat-sheet opens a new frame with useful slime commands and their shortcuts. As Paradis remarks, this is virtually unknown—I sure didn’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Common-lisp | Leave a comment

Impatient Mode

Posted on 2012-08-29 by jcs

You may have seen some of the posts about Chris Wellons’ Emacs HTTP Server, an HTTP server that operates from within Emacs. Now Brian Taylor has built on that to provide Impatient Mode, an Emacs package that renders an Emacs … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Emacs | 1 Comment

Readable S-Expressions

Posted on 2012-08-27 by jcs

Why do people keep doing this? They should stop. Now. Really. There is nothing wrong with parentheses. Lispers like them and deal with them without difficulty. There is nothing wrong with Lisp syntax. Lispers like it and deal with it … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Lisp | 1 Comment

Jon Bentley on Quicksort

Posted on 2012-08-22 by jcs

One of my heroes in Jon Bentley. If you don’t know who he is, this post is for you. If you do know who he is, this post is also for you. Bentley is one of the original Bell Labs … Continue reading →

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The Many Faces of Regex

Posted on 2012-08-17 by jcs

One of a programmer’s most useful tools, Jamie Zawinski notwithstanding, is regular expressions. In a strictly Lisp world, s-expressions solve an astounding number of problems but in the real world of mixed technologies regexes are an incredibly useful and necessary … Continue reading →