Dorophone
dorophone.blogspot.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2008
Dorophone is a Lisp programmer who writes about macros, monads, pattern matching, and the history of Xerox PARC ideas at Apple.
What HN saysHN commenters link his reader macro tutorial for Common Lisp syntax sugar and his essay on PARC's philosophy, which was discussed in earlier threads.
25HN people shared it
3linked it in comments
27stories submitted
472story points
8 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers (2011)3 people · 155 points · first shared 2011 · 113 comments on HN
- 2A survey of syntactic extension techniques in the Lisp family of languages3 people · 13 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 3Implementing Monads in Emacs Lisp (2011)3 people · 6 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 4A Hyperturtle Monad Makes Pretty Pictures2 people · 22 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 5Duckspeak vs. Smalltalk: Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple (2011)1 people · 122 points · first shared 2018 · 77 comments on HN
- 6Common Lisp Reader Macros: A Simple Introduction1 people · 38 points · first shared 2010 · 3 comments on HN
- 7A pattern Matching Library for Elisp1 people · 37 points · first shared 2012 · 5 comments on HN
- 8Struquine: A Useful Lisp Trick1 people · 31 points · first shared 2008 · 2 comments on HN
- 9Smug Lisp Weenies and Lateral Thinking1 people · 20 points · first shared 2008 · 7 comments on HN
- 10Parenlab: S-expressions on top of Matlab/Octave1 people · 7 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 11Dorophone: Introducing Gazelle1 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 12On Lisps1 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 13Common Lisp Reader Macros: A Simple Introduction1 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 14Creating macros in MATLAB1 people · 2 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 15Gazelle- a sensible Lisp for Javascript1 people · 2 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
agumonkey · 2015-10-13
Gosh, so weird to see that perl snippet.
I love the empty degrees of separation predicates, https://gist.github.com/philfreo/7257723#file-gistfile1-pl-L76
I can't help but to think he should have gone list monadic {and lisp too but well, enough dogma}:
http://dorophone.blogspot.com/2011/04/deep-emacs-part-1.html
regularfry · 2013-08-10
My understanding is that the square-bracket notation is just a reader macro to provide syntax sugar. Now, I know Clojure doesn't expose reader macros to the end user, but you could achieve the same syntax in CL without too much hassle (http://dorophone.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/common-lisp-reader-macros-simp… for something similar). I don't think it's necessarily reasonable to criticise it for baking in a choice you could quite happily make in CL.
EDIT: "Criticise" is clearly the wrong word, since your description isn't perjorative. "Distinguish" would be better.
spacemanaki · 2011-09-27
This was published in the New Yorker, and there was some discussion about it when PARC posted something on their blog responding to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2548325
An interesting letter was printed in a subsequent issue: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letters/2011/06/27/110627mama_mail3
whose author wrote a longer blog post about this: http://dorophone.blogspot.com/2011/07/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk.html
I find that whole story a bit poignant, especially given that the MIT Scratch app (Smalltalk based programming for kids) was not allowed into the iPad app store.