Tag Archives: Lisp

SBCL 2.0.0

Posted on 2020-01-06 by jcs

Steel Bank Common Lisp has a new version out. I haven’t been writing much Common Lisp lately so I haven’t kept the software up to date. SBCL makes a new release every month and I always compile from source so … Continue reading →

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Car and Cdr versus Head and Tail

Posted on 2019-12-08 by jcs

Right after parentheses, one of the things about Lisp that non-Lispers—and even some Lispers—like to complain about are the names of the two functions car and cdr. A common understanding is that car returns the first entry of a list … Continue reading →

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Can A Programming Language Be Too Powerful?

Posted on 2019-08-04 by jcs

After writing my post on Emacs and Igors, I reread Rudolf Winestock’s The Lisp Curse that Done mentioned in his article on why Emacs users are like the Igors. Winestock’s article, in turn, mentioned another that I’ve also read before, … Continue reading →

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The Dream Draws Nearer

Posted on 2019-04-21 by jcs

If you’re a hardcore Emacser or Lisper, you’ve probably always drooled over the famous space-cadet keyboard. Just think, you’d have keys for all four bucky bits, not to mention a multitude of other keys with no apparent use if you … Continue reading →

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The Loneliness of the Lisp Programmer

Posted on 2019-01-17 by jcs

This struck me as funny. And all too true.

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A Road to Common Lisp

Posted on 2018-10-19 by jcs

I had years of programming experience before I learned Common Lisp—or any Lisp, for that matter—and I’ve always regretted it. Lisp teaches you new ways of thinking about programming and every programmer should be familiar with it even if they … Continue reading →

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Norvig’s Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming Open Sourced

Posted on 2018-09-11 by jcs

If you have any Lisp experience at all, you almost certainly know about Peter Norvig’s classic Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (PAIP). It’s an excellent introduction to Lisp and, of course, Artificial Intelligence. Via Rainer Joswig we learn that PAIP … Continue reading →

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A Lisp Machine

Posted on 2018-08-21 by jcs

Sorta. Kedalion Daimon has a really interesting project in which he takes an old Brother EP 44 adds an Arduino Due and the very definition of a Rube Goldberg power supply to build a makeshift Lisp machine. It’s a Lisp … Continue reading →

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The Ferret Lisp System

Posted on 2018-08-17 by jcs

Nurullah Akkaya has an interesting project, Ferret, that compiles a Lisp dialect into C++. It’s very portable and can compile code not only for the major platforms but for embedded systems as well. Basically anything that can support C++ can … Continue reading →

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The Machine that Builds Itself

Posted on 2018-08-10 by jcs

Bohdan Khomtchouk, Edi Weitz, and Claes Wahlestedt have an interesting paper that argues for the use of Common Lisp in bioinformatics and computational biology. Lispers will recognize Weitz from his many contributions of outstanding Lisp packages, including the unrivaled CL-PPCRE … Continue reading →

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