Abstract Heresies

Lisp is not the most popular computer language, yet it continues to attract a small but devoted following. Sure, you can find nutters f...

“A Lisp Jedi wielding parentheses-shaped light sabers.” It was suprisingly hard to persuade the image generator to generate a female Common...

I'm tired of people complaining about all the parentheses in Lisp, so I told Gemini to vent for me. This came out pretty good. I suppo...

I'm gathering statistics from thousands of pull requests in GitHub. I wrote a little Lisp program to do that. It's taking a long ...

I was playing with notebooklm.google.com and for fun I entered a few of my recent blog posts. I asked it to generate a conversation. The ...

The first editor I learned how to use was TECO on a line printer. You’d print the line of code you were on, then you’d issue commands to...

How to write an OS in Lisp is beyond the scope of a single post in this blog, and I don‘t have a series prepared. However, I can drop s...

Lisp programs don't have parentheses — they are made of nested linked lists. The parentheses only exist in the printed representati...

One of my hobbies is blacksmithing ( not farrier work). Mild steel is an amazingly versatile material. It's very strong and hard at...

A generator is an abstraction of a sequence of values. It is a procedure that returns the next value in the sequence each time it is i...

Lisp was an early language. These days everyone and his brother has a new language, but Lisp was the first of its kind. John McCarthy,...

With a traditional curly-brace language, you have a model of a machine. A program specifies a sequence of state transitions that the ma...

Suppose you satisfy these axioms: you have a binary function • and a set that • is closed over ( i.e. for all x , y in the set, x • y ...

I use a slightly modified Dvorak keyboard. It is like a standard Dvorak keyboard, but the parentheses have been relocated to be unshifte...

I consider myself a “mostly functional” programmer. I think about programs in terms of data flow and transformations and mappings from ...

One good use of continuation passing style is to manage dynamic resources. The resource allocation function is written in continuation ...

Google's golang was designed for mediocre programmers that aren't “capable of understanding a brilliant language”. It omits fea...

I was amusing myself by looking at Lisp tutorials. They used the idea of a Tic-Tac-Toe service as a motivating example. You’d be able ...

Unlike most languages, Lisp represents its programs as data structures. A Lisp program is a set of nested lists. We can look at a Lisp...

I like rewrite rules. They are simple to understand and easy to implement. If you have a rewrite rule (or a set of them) that makes in...