Category Archives: Programming

Abrams on Literate Programming

Posted on 2015-04-09 by jcs

Howard Abrams has a nice post on Literate Programming. By now that’s a fairly hoary subject—the idea dates back to Knuth in the early 1980s—but Abram’s post is nice because it considers how to do this with Emacs and Org … Continue reading →

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Ferrier on Agile

Posted on 2015-04-07 by jcs

InfoQ has a nice interview with Nic Ferrier on good software and agile. Irreal has mentioned Ferrier several times: he’s a good hacker and someone who deserves to be taken seriously. Ferrier’s take is the agile is a way to … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.2.10

Posted on 2015-04-01 by jcs

SBCL 1.2.10 is out and available at the usual place. This month’s release is mainly bug fixes, although there is one enhancement. You can get all the details from the NEWS page. As usual, the system built and ran the … Continue reading →

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Hunting for Bugs in init.el

Posted on 2015-03-30 by jcs

If you’re an Emacs user and have a non-trivial .emacs or init.el you have almost certainly run into the situation where you make a change or upgrade a package or Emacs and things stop working. I see questions about how … Continue reading →

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Packing C Structures

Posted on 2015-03-22 by jcs

I’m writing this on my MacBook Pro, a small, light-weight laptop that has 16 GB of memory. Nothing I do on it ever runs out of memory. It wasn’t always that way, of course. Bill Gates famously quipped that he … Continue reading →

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The prin* Family

Posted on 2015-03-03 by jcs

This is really a note to myself but I’ll bet many of you are in the same boat. When I want to print something in Elisp, I usually use format but sometimes one of the prin* functions is really what … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.2.9

Posted on 2015-03-01 by jcs

Steel Bank Common Lisp is out and available at the usual place. This month’s release has some optimizations and a bunch of bug fixes. You can get the details from SBCL’s NEWS page. As I say every month, if you’re … Continue reading →

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Getting the Host Name of the Current Browser Page

Posted on 2015-02-18 by jcs

A while ago I wrote about coding some Elisp to grab the URL of the current Web page and turn it into an Org link. It doesn’t seem like it would reduce friction by that much but it really has … Continue reading →

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Inserting C++ Object Names

Posted on 2015-02-03 by jcs

If you have the misfortune to be a C++ user, abo-abo over at (or emacs has a nifty bit of Elisp to make inserting code like some_object.method() much easier.

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SBCL 1.2.8

Posted on 2015-02-03 by jcs

Last night, I installed the latest version (1.2.8) of SBCL. As usual, the regression tests and installation executed without problem. You can get your copy at the usual place. This month’s release fixes some bugs, has three enhancements, and two … Continue reading →

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