@amoroso@fosstodon.org
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

amoroso

@amoroso@fosstodon.org

Astronomy, space, Android, retrocomputing, Lisp, coding.

No stock photos, SEO, marketing, clickbait, ads, or calls to action. I Just enjoy sharing my geeky interests.

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amoroso, to Lisp
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

I didn't know much about John Allen, the author of the classic 1978 book Anatomy of LISP. This post by a researcher who knew him well tells a bit about Allen, his work, and his passion for Lisp and computing.

https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2024/04/11/1249/

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@halla Glad you like it.

amoroso, to Lisp
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

I didn't realize ACM makes available the full-ish archive of the LISP Pointers journal SIGPLAN published from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. It contains most of the papers of most of the issues, an historical treasure of practical value.

https://dl.acm.org/loi/sigplan-lisppointers

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@joeygibson There's plenty of good reading material.

amoroso,
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@weekend_editor I always heard about LISP Pointers but could never subscribe or get my hands on an issue.

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@weekend_editor No thanks, they're available now.

bitzero, to Lisp
@bitzero@corteximplant.net avatar

There's now a long thread about what would make Lisp more successful. Nice idea, but it quickly turned into a good example of why this will never happen and why Lisp rarely fascinates new developers. I do not know if the term "lisplaining" exists already, but the thred is mosly lisplaining now.

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@bitzero Can you elaborate on what you mean by lisplaining?

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@bitzero Okay thanks.

Aside from the attitude I'm not sure what the practical alternatives are. If it's better to adapt Lisp to what a wider audience expects or is comfortable with, this is basically what already happened over the past three decades. I mean the new languages that incorporated many Lisp features and can be, and effectively are, used by a wider audience.

amoroso, to retrocomputing
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

The history of corporate presentations from film slides to PowerPoint. Back in the day we all did our fair share of presentations, but likely with far less fancy film slide equipment.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/11/1077232/corporate-presentations-history/

svetlyak40wt, to random
@svetlyak40wt@fosstodon.org avatar

Do you have ideas, how we could make Lisp more popular and used in widely in commercial companies?

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@svetlyak40wt This paper provided a few suggestions three decades ago:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/192590.192600

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@screwtape And a meta gist: one really has to love and want to use the language.

@jackdaniel @amszmidt @svetlyak40wt

amoroso, to Lisp
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

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."

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/192590.192600

#lisp #CommonLisp #scheme

saustrup, to VintageOSes
@saustrup@mstdn.dk avatar

Firing up on my 40 year old for the first time in probably 35 years. Actually, I'm not sure if I ever go PolyPascal running on it, or it was just the previous version, Compas Pascal. Glad to see an old friend from the era again though. It's been too long.

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@saustrup Was PolyPascal a licensed Turbo Pascal derivative or an independent product?

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@saustrup Doh you're right, I had completely forgotten. So PolyPascal is a very significant piece of historical software.

kev, to random
@kev@fosstodon.org avatar

I read a post from Robb Knight recently about his computing origin story. It was an interesting post, so I thought I'd add my own computing history to the mix.

https://kevquirk.com/my-computing-history

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@kev Looks like your grandparents were as geeky as you.

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@kev Okay but those weren't random devices, so they picked the right ones.

deadblackclover, to Lisp
@deadblackclover@functional.cafe avatar

image/png

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@deadblackclover Very interesting. Do you know where or when was the ad published?

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@deadblackclover Never mind, thanks anyway for sharing.

amoroso, to random
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

I know, Git is a mess. But, since we're stuck with it, we may as well try to learn how it works with resources like this, which aims to lead to some form of Git enlightenment.

https://think-like-a-git.net

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@met Frontends make Git more bearable.

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@underlap Interesting resource, thanks.

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@thezerobit I have a similr defensive approach.

amoroso, to Lisp
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

Alex Schroeder @alex checked out Medley Interlisp and shared his first impressions and goals:

https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-05-11-distractions

By the way, Medley does run on the Raspberry Pi but as a Linux application, not on the bare metal as Alex probably means:

https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/paoloamoroso/early-experience-with-medley-on-the-raspberry-pi-400

amoroso, to emacs
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

The rootwork v0.2 blog posted about the author's journey through text editors, from classics such as vi(m) and Emacs to tools I've never heard of. They explain what they use the editors for and why.

https://write.as/hobbsc/wandering-words-on-text-editors

amoroso,
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

@adrysdale Emacs is actually making a comeback:

https://batsov.com/articles/2024/02/27/m-x-reloaded-the-second-golden-age-of-emacs/

@sachac

amoroso, (edited ) to space
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

These unofficial Mastodon accounts of space agencies are bots that merely share news items the agencies publish elsewhere, yet the accounts have quite a lot of followers:

  • NASA: @nasa 71K followers
  • ESA: @esa 1.4K followers

There's an unfulfilled demand for public institutions to communicate on open and independent platforms.

amoroso,
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@ghose Cool, not bad.

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