Pascal Costanza's Highly Opinionated Blog.
I am moving my blog away from blogspot / blogger. I am going to host my new blog at micro.blog . You can subscribe to an RSS feed on Lisp-related posts if you care only for that. micro.blog also acts as a social network and, although it is its own platform, is compatible with Mastodon. My Mastodon handle is @costanza@micro.blog.
I’m happy to announce the release of the Slick programming language, an s-expression surface syntax for Go, with some extensions inspired by Common Lisp and Scheme. See the Slick programming language repository for more details.
I have moved the Closer project repositories to github. All details around this move are listed at the Closer project website , especially see the list of repositories . Since github provides dedicated means for reporting issues, I’m shutting down the mailing lists for the Closer project as well.
In a recent email exchange discussion, Charlotte Herzeel gave a summary of Common Lisp that I believe is worth repeating publicly. With her permission, I repeat her statements here. “An important reason why I like Common Lisp a lot is that the language has a layered design that supports incremental development. The language provides very high-level programming abstractions, such as object-oriented…
I have recently looked at Julia , a new programming language developed at MIT that promises to be a dynamic programming language that is suitable for scientific computing with a high-performance implementation. It is an interesting project that heavily borrows from Common Lisp , Dylan , and Scheme , and you can rightfully argue that Julia itself is actually a Lisp dialect. While I wasn’t very…
You probably didn't see this coming.
I agree with Jay McCarthy that static typing is anti-human . I think I can give a slightly more elaborate example of a program that every static type checker must reject, but that is nevertheless correct. Everything below is valid Common Lisp: (defclass person () ((name :initarg :name :accessor person-name))) (defmethod display ((p person)) (format t "Person: Name ~S, address ~S." (person-name p)…
The darcs repositories of Closer to MOP now also support ABCL 1.1.1. I plan to make a more official release soon. The Common Lisp implementations currently covered are now as follows: Allegro 9.0, ABCL 1.1.1, CLisp 2.49, Clozure Common Lisp 1.8, CMU CL 20d, ECL 12.12.1, LispWorks 6.0.x and 6.1.x, SBCL 1.1.4, and SCL 1.3.9.
Just to report on work in progress: I am currently working in my spare time on making sure that Closer to MOP works (again) with ABCL and ECL. ABCL is in relatively good shape, but still needs a couple of bugs fixed here and there. Rudi Schlatte is doing a fantastic job at responding to bug reports. I'm pretty sure the next release will have excellent Closer to MOP support. ECL's recent version…
An excellent collection of good arguments against having call/cc in a programming language (such as Scheme), by the ever-inspiring Oleg Kiselyow: An argument against call/cc .
Nice article by Kent Pitman, mostly about his experiences with the Common Lisp standardization process: Common Lisp, the Untold Story .
A short article about an apparently successful digital livescan fingerprinting system .
Nice essay about John McCarthy .
See Beware the Purists, Lest They Kill Your Innovation . Much of what is stated there also strongly applies to programming and programming languages...
Here is a worthwhile read: The Perils of Partially Powered Languages . It's from a Haskell perspective, but should apply to other non-underpowered languages as well. ;)
See here . To cite: "El Emam and his colleagues repeated some of those experiments using bivariate analysis so that they could allocate a share of the blame to code size (measured by number of lines) and the metric in question. It turned out that code size accounted for all of the significant variation: in other words, the object-oriented metrics they looked at didn’t have any actual predictive…
Wow. This is how complicated it gets to have he functionality of special variables in a language that really doesn't want them (and it's brought to you by Google): Google Guice
The Lisp historical archive web site just got reorganized . I have made a quick check of the contents, and found out that Howard I. Cannon's original technical report about Flavors - A non-hierarchical approach to object-oriented programming was finally made available as part of that archive. The report was originally written in 1979, was circulated around Lispers, but was never ever published as…
Now is the time to switch programming languages: Oracle is the borg .
Another interesting conference is coming up: The International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development will be held in Porto de Galinhas, Brazil in March 2011. The conference chair is Shigeru Chiba, who is a long-term contributor to reflection and metaprogramming techniques himself, and who has assembled a diverse program committee covering not only core aspect technologies (like…
The International Lisp Conference (ILC'10) is being held again, sooner than expected: It will be held in October 2010 in Reno, Nevada. This year, the conference will be co-located with OOPSLA/SPLASH , which also hosts the Dynamic Language Symposium . So this event is bound to be a very interesting combination. Paper submission for ILC'10 is open, submission deadline is August 1, so there is enough…
I only now realized that besides the interesting talks and presentations to be given at this year's European Lisp Symposium, there will also be a demonstration of a TI Explorer Lisp Machine . That's pretty cool - I have never seen a Lisp Machine in action, but always wanted to see one, so this will be my first time. Looking forward to that. :) Ah, yes, here is the link again: European Lisp…
The third European Lisp Symposium is less than a month away. I have received the following call for participation to redistribute, which I post here for everyone to read. 3rd European Lisp Symposium May 6-7, 2010, Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal Call for Participation Registration for the 3rd European Lisp Symposium (ELS 2010) is now open . Scope and Programme Highlights The purpose…
I am very excited that I can finally annouce a public release of filtered functions , an extension of generic functions that Charlotte Herzeel, Jorge Vallejos, and myself have developed some time ago and that we are very excited about because it seems to be quite powerful in a number of very different scenarios. It took a while to release filtered functions, because it is a quite non-trivial…
On May 27-29, there will be the 2nd European Lisp Symposium taking place in Milan, Italy. The program looks very exciting, and I will definitely be there (well, due to obvious reasons, see below ;). For example, there are two keynote talks. One is by Kent Pitman who is an award-winning author of technical papers about Lisp , editor of the ANSI Common Lisp specification, and designer of the…