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:
"Scheme and Common Lisp differ mostly in the communities they cater to. Scheme programmers like to talk about how great it is to have a short specification; Common Lisp programmers like to write programs."
I maintained (I was not the original author of) a substantial web spider written in scsh for several years, and I found it a pleasant language to work in.
@simon_brooke Hey buddy, checked out #Scheme/#Scsh yesterday, super intriguing stuff. Actually, I've been digging into #Lisp and its dialects lately. Got curious about why there are so many dialects, you know?
Recently dabbled in #Clojure, which got me looking at Lisp in a new light. Unlike #Haskell, which is awesome for sure, #Lisp has been out of academia and in the market for quite a while... found it pretty cool.
@Ardubal@lobocode True. We also have #Emacs Lisp for 39 years, Portable Standard Lisp for 44 years, #Scheme for 49 years, and #Interlisp for 56 years. Your point is?
I recently opened registration for the April 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 April 20th, full details and schedule can be found here:
Malt: A Deep Learning Framework for Racket by Dan Friedman and Anurag Mendhekar
We discuss the design of a #DeepLearning toolkit, Malt, that has been built for Racket. Originally designed to support the pedagogy of The Little Learner—A Straight Line to Deep Learning, it is used to build deep neural networks with a minimum of fuss using tools like higher-order automatic differentiation and rank polymorphism. The natural, functional style of AI programming that Malt enables can be extended to much larger, practical applications. We present a roadmap for how we hope to achieve this so that it can become a stepping stone to allow #Lisp / #Scheme / #Racket to reclaim the crown of being the language for Artificial Intelligence (perhaps!).
A little over a year ago, originally due to an interest in the deeper history of #compilers, I started diving deep into the #Talmud, studying #Aramaic, #gematria, and doing #DafYomi etc in what has become my deepest engagement with the rabbinic corpus yet -- the Talmud isn't a compiler but rather an extensible interpreter, compiled by compilers over the course of many centuries (build times have gotten significantly faster, my G-d), with novel extensions in the form of rabbinic commentary, glossia and the like being added nearly every century by publishers competing to compile the most elegant editions (Vilna Shaws being paradigmatic). And through studying Talmud and the greater body of rabbinic literature I've found myself encountering #magic/sorcery occasionally, and I just gotta say -- the #SICP metaphor of programming as pure magic, with the #hacker as a sorcerer, goes insanely deep when you start to dig into it.
Hey #scheme, I made a new image that gets together many schemes (and schemers) in the same image, with a CLI that makes it easier, if not easy to build portable libraries, if not programs.
#;> united.scm available
loko
chicken
mit
sagittarius
gauche
racket
gambit
guile
chez-cisco
stklos
chibi
· Frontend for several Scheme implementations · One CLI, many schemes ·
· The best ui/ux to build portable Scheme libraries ·
· All around finest competition in software engineering ·
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