Category Archives: Programming

Elisp Challenge No. 2

Posted on 2012-03-30 by jcs

The other day, I found a reference to the Add-A-Gram puzzle, which is one of the retired challenges from ITA Software for prospective employees. Today’s challenge is to solve the Add-A-Gram puzzle with Emacs/Elisp. I’ll give a solution next week.

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Weitz On Macros

Posted on 2012-03-28 by jcs

Edi Weitz has a very nice set of notes on The Power of Lisp Macros. They’re from a talk he gave at freiheit.com and are aimed at the beginning Lisper. They’re amazingly easy to follow even though you aren’t hearing … Continue reading →

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About Those Insecure RSA Keys

Posted on 2012-03-22 by jcs

Last month I wrote a short post on some research that showed some RSA public keys are insecure. A couple days ago I noticed that the excellent Programming Praxis has a challenge based on that research and subsequent reporting in … Continue reading →

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Sending Mail Semi-Programmatically In Emacs

Posted on 2012-03-21 by jcs

I have an ongoing project that I manage with an Org mode file. The file has the structure * [2012-03-21 Wed] ** Second Level Headline Some information about the second level headline … where the level one headlines are the … Continue reading →

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Linking To Receipts

Posted on 2012-03-17 by jcs

I’ve written before about how I use Emacs and Org mode to track expenses for tax purposes. At the heart of the system are Org tables for various categories of expenses. Last month, I wrote about how a small piece … Continue reading →

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Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, And Elisp Compared

Posted on 2012-03-12 by jcs

A month ago we had a lively discussion here at Irreal on the question of whether or not Elisp sucks. As with most questions of this sort, there were champions of both positions: some felt that Elisp is a distinctly … Continue reading →

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Quicklisp

Posted on 2012-03-10 by jcs

After being inspired to finally start using ELPA to handle my Emacs packages, I decided to try out Zach Beane’s Quicklisp library manager for Common Lisp. Up until now, I’ve been using the manual method to get things into ASDF, … Continue reading →

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Reversing An Emacs Lisp List In-Place

Posted on 2012-03-03 by jcs

Yesterday, Xah Lee put up a post that showed how to reverse arrays and lists in various languages, including Emacs Lisp. His Elisp examples worked only for arrays so I added one for lists in the comments. Later I realized … Continue reading →

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Yegge On Dynamic Languages

Posted on 2012-02-28 by jcs

I stumbled upon a nice talk that Steve Yegge gave at Stanford in 2008. The talk, entitled Dynamic Languages Strike Back, debunks some of the myths about the performance, optimization, and tools for dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, Perl, … Continue reading →

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Not Macros; Read

Posted on 2012-02-18 by jcs

James Long has an interesting post up at his blog entitled Lisp: It’s Not About Macros, It’s About Read in which he argues that what makes Lisp so powerful is not really macros but the read function. The reason for … Continue reading →

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