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Maven and Idea

Here is how to ask Maven to generate Idea project files for you:

mvn idea:idea -DjdkName=1.5

(via Maven)

ParEdit for Editing Lispy Languages

ParEdit (paredit.el) is a minor mode for performing structured editing of S-expression data. The typical example of this would be Lisp or Scheme source code.

ParEdit helps keep parentheses balanced and adds many keys for moving S-expressions and moving around in S-expressions.

That quote from EmacsWiki really undersells Paredit, though.

Paredit makes it virtually impossible to un-balance parentheses (aka round, square, and curly brackets).

This mode would be especially interesting for folks avoiding Lisp because of the nightmare of balancing parentheses is too much of an obstacle to overcome (in practice of course it really isn’t, even if you don’t use Paredit).

When You Just Can’t Imagine…

Something to consider…

“I can’t imagine why anyone would need X” is a statement about your imagination, not X.

(via Dan)

Funny Java Standards

Swing is the GUI standard for Java. Clojure is the awesomeness standard for Java.

(via Stuart)

Adding Clojure support to listings

In this post Alex shares his patch for adding Clojure support to the excellent LaTeX listings package.

Eiffel gets a new for-each-like syntax

Here is an article explaining Eiffel’s new for-each-like syntax.

It is pretty interesting to see how the language evolves… obviously a very different approach then the Lisp-ish “just add the syntax you need” approach.

Addendum:01/30/10

Changed the title as I meant ‘for-each’ and not ‘map’.

A Review of Scheme Modes in Emacs

Here is a nice review of Scheme modes for Emacs.

Spring 2010 Classes

In Spring of 2010 I am taking two classes: MSCS 6020: Simulation (syllabus) and MSCS 6060: Parallel & Distributed Systems (syllabus).

A Scheme Developers Almanac for RNRS

In the early 2000s Sun published The Java Developers Almanac. It was a basically a listing of code snippets explaining how to perform the most common operations that developers might want to accomplish at his “day job”. You can find examples of the examples here.

It was great for the language; it made it easy for loads of developers to get productive quickly. While something like this can certainly be abused via copy-and-paste; you can also use it to learn. Hopefully a lot of developers did learn. I wonder if something like this would be interesting for the RNRS world?

The reason is that the revised reports are just that: reports. They are not standards in the sense of the Common Lisp standard. Rather they are a report of the commonalities across different Scheme implementations.

The features provided by R6RS make it is a tad more convenient to write “portable” code. In light of that, I wonder if it would be of any value to have a sort of Scheme developers almanac written only using R6RS code for example. Things like this exist today with Schemewiki, and nearly every individual distribution, but, it might be nice to see how much you can do with only what the report provides along with the libraries that folks have implemented on top of it.

The Experience of the Delight of Learning

The experience of the delight of learning is such a wonderful thing.

Have you felt it lately? How?