I just opened registration for the June iteration of the "Hands-On Guile Scheme for Beginners" course!
This is an 8-week course that is a mixture of on-demand learning content, live Q&A sessions, practical exercises, and a private forum where I answer all your questions.
This iteration officially begins on June 8th, full details and schedule can be found here:
Streaming Day 7 of my Spring Lisp Game Jam project right now!
Today we'll try to implement the logic script for the Hero so that he can try to capture all the treasure on the map, and more behaviors for the monsters to use to stop him!
Streaming Day 4 of my Spring Lisp Game Jam project right now!
Today I'll start implementing a minimal, Scheme-like scripting language for the monsters in the game. We'll finally start to see it become somewhat playable!
To anyone writing programs in #Scheme right now, this is just a reminder that you can search through a huge cluster of Scheme libraries indexed by procedure name, including all SRFIs, at the https://index.scheme.org/ website. If you need code to do something, try searching by keyword to see if someone has already written it. Most APIs listed there even have Haskell-like types and are tagged as "pure" if they are pure.
Streaming Day 3 of my Spring Lisp Game Jam project right now!
Today I'll start building the interactive script editor that will enable you to edit the logic scripts for the game's monsters. This will be my first attempt at writing DOM-manipulating UI code in Hoot so it should be fun!
Streaming Day 2 of my Spring Lisp Game Jam project right now!
We'll continue building out the game world by adding a few game objects and possibly wiring up their basic logic. If we have time, we might start working on the interactive editor!
I'm doing some thinking about whether to learn common #lisp or #scheme and create tutorials for others at the beginning like myself.
The focus would not be on syntax or an encyclopedia of available commands or external libraries. It would be about "thinking" and decomposing problems into algorithms.
So far I like that scheme is tiny, has pretty much one syntax, leaving us undistracted from the problem to solve.
In this 1994 paper Richard Waters acknowledged the momentum of C and its implications for the Lisp ecosystem. He laid out a stretegy for the survival and growth of Lisp focused on the development of a critical mass of reusable software.
Three decades later the Lisp community has come a long way but, as Waters concluded back then:
"As long as we are a vibrant community [...] Lisp will hold its own."
Looking for some Friday #guix reading? How about the next step in the #packaging tutorial? Overview of the build-system concept, and how to provide arguments. We meet the #guile#scheme repl (guix repl) to discuss when to use 'quote' and 'quasiquote' in package definitions.
This is interesting but not new. Max Bernstein published two blog post series on implementing Lisp, one on writing an interpreter in OCaml and the other on a compiler in C.
A weird thing about being 50 is that there are programming languages that I've used regularly for longer than some of the software developers I work with have been alive. I first wrote BASIC code in the 1980s. The first time I wrote an expression evaluator--a fairly standard programming puzzle or homework--was in 1990. I wrote it in Pascal for an undergraduate homework assignment. I first wrote perl in the early 1990s, when it was still perl 4.036 (5.38.2 now). I first wrote java in 1995-ish, when it was still java 1.0 (1.21 now). I first wrote scala, which I still use for most things today, in 2013-ish, when it was still scala 2.8 (3.4.0 now). At various times I've been "fluent" in 8086 assembly, BASIC, C, Pascal, perl, python, java, scala; and passable in LISP/Scheme, Prolog, old school Mathematica, (early days) Objective C, matlab/octave, and R. I've written a few lines of Fortran and more than a few lines of COBOL that I ran in a production system once. I could probably write a bit of Haskell if pressed but for some reason I really dislike its syntax so I've never been enthusiastic about learning it well. I've experimented with Clean, Flix, Curry, Unison, Factor, and Joy and learned bits and pieces of each of those. I'm trying to decide whether I should try learning Idris, Agda, and/or Lean. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a few languages. Bit of 6502 assembly long ago. Bit of Unix/Linux shell scripting languages (old enough to have lived and breathed tcsh before switching to bash; I use fish now mostly).
When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.
I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.
I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:
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