Note: the examples here only work with outlet lisp. Refer to your version of lisp/scheme’s documentation for how read works (and possibly other forms)I know it’s an old post by now, but something about the article Why I love Common Lisp and hate Java, part II rubbed me the wrong way. The examples just aren’t that good. The usage of macros is plain baffling, when a function would have been fine. The author admits this, but still does it. There’s a follow-up post which focuses more on macros but it still misses the point.Here’s the thing: it’s not really...

“Common what?” is a common reply I get when I mention Common Lisp. Perhaps rightly so, since Common Lisp is not all that common these days.Developed in the sixties, it is one of the oldest programming languages out there. In its heydays it was used mostly for Artificial Intelligence research at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the like, and therefore has a lingering association with AI. People not in AI shy away from Lisp. Common Lisp is a powerful and versatile programming language that can and should be used more often in other paradigms. It saddens me to see that Common L...

Lisp programmers should stop reading right now because they'll likely suffer severe injury of the jaw muscles as they laugh themselves silly at how hard it is to do some things in C. The C language has a pre-processor (typically called cpp) that is both infuriating and powerful. How powerful is usually best described as 'just too little' and it has happened more than once that I found myself almost - but not quite - able to do what I wanted to do.The frustration can run very deep at times like these. Recently I had another battle with the C pre-processor to write a set of macros to accompl...

The company I work for has a lot of legacy Ruby code, and as Ruby has become kind of a mainstream language, I decided to get a book about it and learn how it works. As my learning resource, I chose The Ruby Programming language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto as that receives great customer reviews, covers Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9 and is authoritative because the language creator is one of the authors. The book makes a good read in general. There are plenty of code examples, but not too much to obscure the prose. What I found first interesting, later annoyi...