P4P: This document proposes an alternate syntax for Racket. It reduces the parenthetical burden, makes the language appear more traditional, and respects indentation, though not in the way you think. It does all this while retaining the essence of Racket syntax, and even offering a high degree of tool reuse. (via Racket-users)
While trying to set up Clojure under Cygwin I found that doing mixed-mode between Cygwin and Java isn’t very happy due to the ‘;’ vs ‘:’ in the classpath. This post (via this post) provided an obfuscated Ruby program to take care of that for you… thanks! #!/bin/ruby # Slightly obfuscated cygwin + windows java [...]
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 [...]
Ben referred us to this article (cached here) in the midst of a discussion about, among other things, why there is still no FFI in the Scheme standard. That article is really interesting. What did you think about it?
Here is a recording of an informal presentation I gave to the Twin Cities Lisp User group on Scheme in relation to Lisp. Schemers wouldn’t learn anything new here; but perhaps if you are a Lisper you might find it informative (I didn’t get booed off stage by the 40 or so Lispers in attendance, [...]
Here is a recording of an informal presentation I gave to the Twin Cities Lisp User group on Hygienic Macros. Schemers wouldn’t learn anything new here; but perhaps if you are a Lisper you might find it informative (I didn’t get booed off stage by the 25 or so Lispers in attendance, if that is [...]
Lisp has jokingly been called “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer”. I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts. – Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10
Scheme and Lisp force you *think* from the get-go. Most engineers and programmers hate to do that and it makes them uncomfortable. Starting a program in Java or C is easy. There’s a pile of boilerplate you can type without thinking about it, and it `feels’ like you’re programming. Then you have to haul out [...]
In this post on the PLT discussion list I asked: What is all the fuss about how you can write DSLs in Lisp? Everyone from thought-leaders to blog-posters to grandma’s are talking about how Lisp is so great for DSLs. About what are these people talking about? Because no one of said people actually elaborate [...]