You need hygiene because:
Only superstars on their highest alert level [while writing macros] get things right all the time.
–Matthias
That said, hygiene alone isn’t a cure-all for writing predictable macros. If you don’t understand what you are doing, thoroughly; you will screw up eventually. “Thar be dragons here” as someone once warned on the PLT list.
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SCHEME AND FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING WORKSHOP 2009
Cambridge, Massachusetts
August 22, 2009
CALL FOR PAPERS
http://www.schemeworkshop.org/2009/
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(via PLT)
daemontools is a collection of tools for managing UNIX services.
supervise monitors a service. It starts the service and restarts the service if it dies. Setting up a new service is easy: all supervise needs is a directory with a run script that runs the service.
multilog saves error messages to one or more logs. It optionally timestamps each line and, for each log, includes or excludes lines matching specified patterns. It automatically rotates logs to limit the amount of disk space used. If the disk fills up, it pauses and tries again, without losing any data.
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Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday February 23th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B
Dimitris Vyzovitis will give a talk about Programming gerbils: Distributed programming with PLT-Scheme.
vyzo will talk about gerbil, a little language for distributed programming using PLT-Scheme. Gerbil is a macro language that provides facilities for actor-based distributed programs and transparent network simulation.
vyzo is a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab who suffers from a severe scheme addiction.
His website is at http://web.media.mit.edu/~vyzo/
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I tried it for the first time and it works flawlessly.
On the whole, it seems like the majority of people today are overworked, underappreciated, and generally unhappy. This is particularly upsetting since it occurs in one of the most prosperous countries in the world: the USA.
Everything has an expiration date: food, friends, and even ideas.
It is part of life.
It seems like my culture has expended a great amount of effort in teaching the individual how to identify and report on the sad state of affairs which he is in, but has not taken the next logical step by teaching him how to move beyond that state. He is a man who knows how to identify problems , with no chance of solving them. This is a cruel punishment that has created a culture full of problems seemingly without solutions.
John asked about the status of the PLT Scheme PLaneT source search system here; to which Jens replied here and referenced this post. This post has information about why you might want to use the search engine (find out where set! is abused!) and also links to all of his posts about the development of the engine itself.
Jens mentions that he is not able to focus on maintenance at the moment; but if anyone is interested he would be happy to pass them the code.
James had mentioned applicative and normal order in a post, on which Matthias commented and then elaborated here.
Normal order and applicative order are failed attempts to explain the nature of call-by-name programming languages and call-by-value programming languages as models of the lambda calculus. Each describes a so-called _reduction strategy_, which is an algorithm that picks the position of next redex BETA that should be reduced. By 1972, it was clear that instead you want different kind of calculi for different calling conventions and evaluation strategies (to the first outermost lambda, not inside). That is, you always reduce at the leftmost-outermost point in a program but you use either BETA-NAME or BETA-VALUE. Non-PL people were confused (and still are) because BETA-NAME looks like BETA but nearly 40 years later, everyone should figure this out. SICP was written when the majority of people were still confused. — Matthias