Have you ever heard of librep?
librep is a dialect of Lisp, designed to be used both as an extension language for applications, and for use as a general programming language. It was originally written to be mostly-compatible with Emacs Lisp, but has subsequently diverged markedly. Its aim is to combine the best features of Scheme [...]
Monthly Archives: February 2008
Low Exposure: librep
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Purely Functional Data Structures
Saturday, February 9, 2008
In a thoughtful post on his blog, Chris Okasaki reflects back on his seminal contribution to the study of purely functional data structures.
Visualizing Lisp without parentheses
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Michael Weber had the inspiration to imagine how might one visualize Lisp without parentheses in his mwe-color-box.el extension to Emacs.
Below is a screenshot from Michael’s page. More of Michael’s Emacs Hackery is available here.
Low Exposure: IronScheme
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Have you ever heard of IronScheme?
IronScheme [aims] to be a R6RS compliant Scheme implementation based on the Microsoft DLR.
These aren’t just nebulous goals either, they’ve actually got the interpreter up and running!
With so much development going on around the DLR right now; I’m going to pay extra special attention to when the *next* Lang.NET symposium [...]
Using Scheme’s Eval in Sandbox
Saturday, February 9, 2008
One of the most tantalizing features that folks hear about Scheme is the eval function. While in reality, when it comes to meta-programming most modern Scheme distributions have evolved other mechanisms to do so, eval is still a big draw. The biggest shock most folks have when it comes to Scheme, though, is that you [...]
Low Exposure: TinyScheme
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Have you ever heard of TinyScheme?
TinyScheme is a lightweight Scheme interpreter that implements as large a subset of R5RS as was possible without getting very large and complicated. It is meant to be used as an embedded scripting interpreter for other programs.
Why you might want to learn FORTH
Saturday, February 9, 2008
You may or may have not heard about the programming language Forth, but if you have heard about it, you are very likely to have heard about it from some very happy, passionate Forth developers!
The best advocacy/introduction/tutorial I’ve ever read about Forth is located in the beginning of source code for this Forth interpreter!
After reading [...]
Static and Dynamic in Programming Languages
Saturday, February 9, 2008
References to static and dynamic programming language features often come up on discussion boards; and are often made in an inconsistent if not confusing manner. It seems that dynamic and static refer both to name binding and type checking. I wanted a clarification; the following is my take on what I learned based on reading [...]
Sometimes the first 80 percent is “good enough”
Saturday, February 9, 2008
There is a joke among programmers: when the project manager asks how complete is the project, and you’ve finally reached the “%80 complete” mark, you tell him the good news because now you all know how long it will take to finish the 2nd %80 of the project! Sometimes this is just how efforts evolve; [...]
Bubba Zanetti on “the it factor” in programming
Friday, February 8, 2008
When it comes to identifying “the it factor” in programmers, everyone has an opinion. Paul Graham attributes it to good taste. Bertrand Meyer attributes it to doing things with class. Neither of them, though, of even come close to revealing the truth of it as Bubba Zanetti, the preeminent philosopher of the wasteland, did when [...]