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Emacs is hurting Clojure
Emacs is a very powerful text editor and its popularity amongst Clojurians is easily understood. Emacs has a long tradition in the Lisp communities as it’s written, in a big part, in a flavor of Lisp called Emacs Lisp. Because of its history, it handles Lisp code wonderfully, with automatic correct indentation, paraedit, integration with…
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Macros, the Lisp advantage
Learning about macros in Lisps was one of my biggest whoa-moments in my programming career and since then I’ve given presentations about them to audiences ranging from 1 to 100 people. I have a little script that I follow in which I implement a custom form of the if-conditional. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve managed…
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Why I love Lisp
This post was extracted from a small talk I gave at Simplificator, where I work, titled “Why I love Smalltalk and Lisp”. There’s another post titled “Why I love Smalltalk” published before this one. Lisp is an old language. Very old. Today there are many Lisps and no single language is called Lisp today. Actually,…
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Getting started with La Clojure on Mac OS X, a visual guide
These are instructions to get started with Clojure using IntelliJ IDEA, La Clojure and Leiningen for people that don’t know any of those tools. They are for Mac OS X but they may be adaptable to other operating systems as well. It doesn’t expect you to know Clojure or IntelliJ IDEA. I think this might…
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Common Lisp method composition
I’ve made an image to describe Common Lisp method composition (or CLOS method composition if you want):
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Another simplistic solution, with SCons
SCons is a program designed to replace make and autotools. SCons being a new tool is built with all the knowledge of what problem really this kind of tool should be solving, while make and autotools were built while discovering the real problem. It is natural to expect SCons to have a better design that…
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Solving Lisp’s problem: a simplistic solution with make
I recently stated what I believe is the biggest problem with Lisp, you can’t make programs with it. In my quest, my first solution is a very simplistic Makefile that does the job using cl-launch, a very interesting program that can turn a Common Lisp program into a Bash script. Other solutions are likely to…
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The problem with Lisp
I’m not really going to talk about the problem with Lisp, but only a problem. And I’m not really going to talk about Lisp, but Common Lisp. So this post should be called “A problem with Common Lisp”, but the current title is more catchy, isn’t it? You are still with me? nice. Because I…
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A programmer’s favourite language
I’ve discovered something recently. Most programmers have a favourite programming language. No, that’s not it, there’s more to my discovery. Whenever those programmers have an idea they open a text editor and start coding and/or they start playing with a REPL, if they are lucky to like a programming language that provides one. You watch…