Tag Archives: Lisp

Living In Flatland

Posted on 2025-12-12 by jcs

Nathan Marz has an interesting post that makes use of the flatland metaphor to explain Lisp. For those who don’t know, the book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions describes a two dimensional world inhabited by polygons of various sorts. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Extensibility In Lisp And Emacs

Posted on 2025-09-15 by jcs

Joe Marshall has a nice post on Why Lisp Still Matters. He observes that Lisp tends to attract the very best programmers but the reason for that and the reason for Lisp’s enduring success is its extensibility. As Marshall says, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meet Friday: Parenthesis: Get Over It Already

Posted on 2025-05-02 by jcs

As you almost certainly know, we here at Irreal have little patience for those constantly whining about parentheses in Lisp. They seem to us like little kids complaining to Mom that “it’s not fair”. Apparently, we’re not the only ones. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Why Lisp “Lost”

Posted on 2025-03-07 by jcs

Back in 2018, Steve Losh wrote a very nice, long post on A Road to Common Lisp. If you’re a Lisper, it’s well worth reading. Recently, Alexander_Selkirk posted, without comment, a link to that post. The last time I wrote … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Parenthesis In Lisp

Posted on 2025-02-07 by jcs

I love Lisp. I think it’s the perfect language for a very wide variety of problems, that it’s powerful, easy to learn, and that it provides the perfect environment for what I call exploratory programming. There are some downsides. One … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Iterating In Lisp

Posted on 2025-01-18 by jcs

Joe Marshall has an interesting post on iteration for all you Lisp heads. It’s mostly aimed at Common Lisp and Scheme but a lot of it applies to Elisp as well so even Emacs users will be interested. The mail … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Only Computer Science Book Worth Reading Twice

Posted on 2024-11-24 by jcs

Longtime Irreal readers know that I consider Abelson’s & Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) arguably the best computer science book of all time. There’s Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming of course but for the average software … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Getting Car Sick With Lisp

Posted on 2024-11-17 by jcs

Just a quickie today. Over at the Lisp subredit, breck says that he used to program in Lisp but got car sick. It’s a pretty weak pun but the commenters took up the challenge and kept the ball rolling. DrownNotably … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Is Lisp Syntax Boring

Posted on 2024-10-04 by jcs

Wait. What? Is Lisp syntax boring? My immediate response is, “Of course it is.” That’s its strength. Lisp doesn’t have much syntax so unlike other languages you can immediately start using the language without having to worry about learning a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Why Isn’t Lisp Used More In Production Redux

Posted on 2024-08-24 by jcs

I just came across an excellent Medium article by Kenichi Sasagawa that addresses the question of Why Isn’t Lisp Used More In Production that I wrote about the other day. My post took the somewhat cynical view that Lisp lost … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment