I'm a DBA by day and a youth pastor by night. I love Perl.
Programmers are passionate about their tools, and if there is one tool they are especially passionate about, it is their text editor. An editor war has raged between Emacs and vi for decades, and new challengers such as VS Code and Sublime Text vie f...
The cl-cffi-gtk library provides Common Lisp bindings to GTK. The library is developed with SBCL but should also work with Clozure CL and CLISP. For this tutorial, I'll be using SBCL. Instead of building yet another calculator, let's build a GUI for ...
PS/Tk stands for a portable Scheme interface to the Tk GUI toolkit. It has a rich history going all the way back to Scheme_wish by Sven Hartrumpf in 1997. Wolf-Dieter Busch created a Chicken port called Chicken/Tk in 2004. It took on its current name...
Embedded Qt5 Lisp (EQL5) is a Qt5 binding for Embedded Common Lisp (ECL). EQL5 is a bit different than most bindings. Instead of executing your Lisp source with ecl and importing the bindings, you compile a new interpreter (eql5) that combines both E...
Clojure is a dialect of Lisp that runs on the JVM. JavaFX is a modern GUI toolkit for the JVM. You could use JavaFX directly with Clojure's Java interop, but Cljfx provides a declarative and functional wrapper for JavaFX. Instead of building yet anot...
If you ever troubleshoot a problem on Red Hat (or closely related distros such as Fedora and CentOS), you'll come across dozens of tutorials and articles that tell you to resolve the problem by disabling SELinux. It's not just random blog posts and q...
This is not really a post about Vala--though I do think Vala deserves a closer look. It is about the general philosophy of evaluating programming languages. I also wrote a post that's not really about Perl. There are so many programming languages out...
This tutorial was updated on January 10, 2021 to generate a tone using LambdaNative instead of merely wrapping a Linux-only command-line program called beep that controls the PC speaker. This should now make it possible to follow this tutorial on any...
The title is intentionally provocative. This is not really a post about Perl--though I do think Perl usually is the right tool (at least for me). It is about the general philosophy of picking a language for a project and learning new languages. Chanc...
This tutorial was updated on January 10, 2021 to generate a tone using Racket instead of merely wrapping a Linux-only command-line program called beep that controls the PC speaker. This should now make it possible to follow this tutorial on any OS su...