Lemonodor

pg mentioned that he uses vi with a REPL ( http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=587 ). I recently began using emacs + SLIME for writing Lisp and revert back to vim for everything else. I've also tried vim + VIlisp.vim, which sends Lisp code to a running Lisp interpreter. It seemed pretty decent though I don't really have enough experience writing Lisp to really compare. Anyone else write Lisp in vi? SLIME is great, but I really miss vim sometimes. Fortunately, Slim-Vim is in the works by the author of VIlisp.vim. Here's a couple comment pages on Lisp with vi/emacs: http://programming.reddit.com/info/1cij7/comments http://www.lemonodor.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=689

A comment by Steve Huffman on my blog[1], from back when they switched away to Python: I didn't say the are *no* shoulders to stand on. There are just fewer. Without a doubt, Edi Weitz single-handedly made reddit possible. He's an army-of-one producing good Lisp libraries. The issues that made it really hard to stick with Lisp weren't particularily Lispy. The biggest trouble that plagued us was that we could never quite get Lisp reddit stable enough to sleep at night. There were weird threading issues that would bring the site to its knees a couple times a day and required constant monitoring. Another comment, from Paul Graham: > One can argue that they betrayed the worth of a > philosophy merely for cheap money. Ye gods, enough with the conspiracy theories already. Y Combinator didn't know Reddit was going to use Lisp when we funded them. And the reason they switched (or at least, the last straw) was all too mundane: some thread bug in CMUCL that made the site keep crashing. 1. http://lemonodor.com/archives/001301.html

> Really, has there been a backlash against me? I hadn't noticed any change. I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it. http://lemonodor.com/archives/001091.html

A very smart man, PG himself, once said [0]: > I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. PG started writing essays about what he knows well (programming, start ups), then about things he knows a bit (painting) and then stuff like this, or his essays on economic policy. In any case, he predicted his own future quite well. [0] quoted here https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm from there http://lemonodor.com/archives/001091.html#c8508

The TI Explorer LX had a 68020 co-processor running Unix: http://lemonodor.com/archives/2002/10/ti_explorer_fam.html

I think it's an old thing from paste.lisp.org from: http://lemonodor.com/archives/001207.html

~12 years ago, it was Patrick Collison that was named young scientist of the year for developing a dialect of Lisp called Croma: http://lemonodor.com/archives/001038.html I'm glad to see he has continued to do well.

True, but it could be turned into executable Lisp code without much effort. As could a XML format version of it. Besides, square brackets is the most common representation of lists. It's difficult to find round brackets denoting lists outside of Lisp and dialets. I doubt that's a coincidence. Given that Apple already uses Scheme in its sandbox implementation [1], it wouldn't be too outlandish to assume those are related somehow. The notation is a bit off, but it's nothing a few macros wouldn't solve. [1] http://lemonodor.com/archives/2007/10/sexprs_in_leopard.html

> Jak & Daxter the whole engine was lisp based. Only when "the whole" is defined to mean "the object scripting." http://www.psxextreme.com/feature/45.html "The final game engine has about nine different renderers, each is optimized for its specific task." http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LispInJakAndDaxter "GOOL was used to control objects in the game" Jak II had apparently the most of GOAL: http://lemonodor.com/archives/000610.html "Of the 1.2 million lines of code, roughly 900,000 lines are written in GOAL." Still that leaves 300,000 lines which were certainly the most low-level and performance-sensitive ones. The 900,000 lines aren't exactly "the Lisp," but that custom language, developed using the commercial Lisp, but I admit it's certainly an engineering achievement.

You're right. I don't know where my head was at when I made that comment. I was totally wrong and I apologize the the parent and everyone else who came across it. Maybe I was struggling to recall Dan Wienreb's post[0] on the failure of Symbolics and somehow confusing that with other things and not making much sense. Thanks for clarifying. [0] http://lemonodor.com/archives/2007/11/why_did_symbolics_fail.html

Is it substantially different from uWink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UWink), or just better executed (http://lemonodor.com/archives/2008/05/uwink_a_cold_greasy_plate_of_fai…

I'm 21. I wrote a bit about how I ended up getting into Lisp at http://lemonodor.com/archives/001038.html. (And I'm glad I did, because I can hardly remember now.)

I thought Orbitz uses Lisp: http://www.lemonodor.com/archives/000003.html

I like it, but would like to see something more general. Copy-move detection would be neat: http://www.lemonodor.com/archives/2008/02/protecting_journalistic_inte…

Montezuma is nice. Also see how it "relates" to Lucene: http://lemonodor.com/archives/001361.html

OK, picked one random whine: "When an invalid program finally crashes (or enters an infinite loop, or goes to sleep forever), what you're left with is basically the binary snapshot of its state (a common name for it is a "core dump"). You have to make sense of it in order to find the bug." If you write an invalid program... Then you are doing it completely wrong! (http://lemonodor.com/archives/2007/10/youre_doing_it_wrong.html) There are two types of peope: those who belive what they read and those who want to try out their own and then read and after that whine or ... :)

Currently have these printed and posted on the wall for fun: McCarthy - Programming: You're doing it completely wrong http://lemonodor.com/images/mccarthy-youre-doing-it-wrong-s.jpg Djikstra - Quick and Dirty: I would not like it http://flickr.com/photos/mando/1591358554/ Picard - Facepalm: Because expressing how dumb that was in words just doesn't work http://www.forumammo.com/cpg/albums/userpics/10071/picard-no-facepalm.…

http://lemonodor.com/images/norvig-at-web20-s.jpg He did ok with his shirts.

I like that picture of Dijkstra, but the one on lemonodor is better: http://lemonodor.com/archives/2007/10/youre_doing_it_wrong.html Zach Beane is awesome. PS: And where is Linus? I guess he doesn't dress stereotypically enough.

I tried to post a comment, but there seems to be a problem with their Lisp CGI's. On Lisp vs. Python: http://lemonodor.com/archives/001497.html "Readable" languages are rather manager-centric. And because software managers become increasingly unimportant (or decreasingly important :), so will "readable" languages. Of course programmers need readability too, but given a choice they'd rather stick to a concise and powerful language. Why? Probably because a powerful language, among other things, doesn't require you to get back to your code and fix it too often, and hence, you don't need that language to be too readable. It allows you to solve a problem in small, rock-solid and easily testable chunks. I'm desperately looking for such a powerful "write-and-forget" programming language. Is it Lisp? I don't know yet.

Very interesting insight into the Explorer development, thanks for posting the link! Some (possibly) interesting comments: - "later I think TI made (or tried to make) a plug-in card version of the TI Explorer for Macs" - this was the MicroExplorer NuBus card for Mac II-series machines, which was somewhat popular. Symbolics also built a NuBus Lisp machine board for Macs. - "This machine had one of the largest CPUs ever made until that time, something like half a million transistors." The original version of the Explorer (Explorer I) implemented the CPU in TTL logic (plus microcode ROMs and PROMs to implement some logic functions) on two large NuBus boards, the integrated version was later used in the Explorer II and MicroExplorer. - "the entire computer division was sold off to HP soon after I left" - one of the sad stories, HP destroyed a number of companies after they took over. In addition to TI's computer department (the TI990 16 bit machines were sold to some other company), Apollo, Tandem and DEC (via Compaq) suffered a similar fate. - "Pretty sure the sale included a sweet little Unix box". This was the TI1500, a 680x0-based asymmetric multiprocessor machine running TI System V (SVR3) with some pretty advanced concepts for its time (such as software RAID/striping), which was also based on NuBus. You could add a TI 68020 CPU board to an Explorer and run Unix on the side. I used to service and admin TI1500 machines as a student and am possibly the last person on…

There's this recent video showing a little of what the Pharo Smalltalk environment is like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuZyOKa91o The video was made by a Ruby programmer, rather than an experience Smalltalker, so it's more a newbie showing you cool things he's discovered, rather than an expert showing the power of the system. On the other hand, there's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk That one is an expert, Kalman Reti, showing some of what it's like to work with a Symbolics Lisp Machine. (It's not a real Lisp machine; they're all at least thirty years old now; this is an emulator running the old Symbolics OS on Linux). Go to YouTube and search for Rainer Joswig and you'll find a few video demos of Lisp Machines and MCL and so forth. Finally, here are a few images from about eighteen years ago, also from Rainer. They show various views of the Macintosh Common Lisp and SK8 environments. It's not an experienced user showing you around, but at least you can get some idea what the environments looked like: http://www.lemonodor.com/archives/000028.html