TIL: The loudest Lisp program in the world Today I learned about a program that generates the sounds that help people navigate as they exit long tunnels when an emergency such as a fire has destroyed the visibility. The World's Loudest Lisp Program to the Rescue This describes th … | Continue reading
Peter Lynch (2006) A very technical examination of the world's first numerical weather "prediction" – although in fact it was really a "postdiction", taking detailed data and using it to compute a scenario that could be compared against a known ground truth. It was an incredible … | Continue reading
Stephen Walker (2021) The space race from the American perspective is well-known: this book presents the same race from the Soviet perspective. The differences are profound, of course, mainly driven by the Soviet programme occurring in complete secrecy to duck the risks that fail … | Continue reading
TIL: Cognitohazards Could social media posts be actively damaging to our mental health? – literally, not just figuratively? That's the premise of a TechScape article in The Guardian, that draws on both science fiction and psychological research. In Neal Stephenson's "Snow crash" … | Continue reading
Nick Wallis (2021) The history of what is still as I write this an ongoing scandal: perhaps the greatest miscarriage of justice in UK history, when the Post Office turned on and prosecuted its own operators for fraud on the basis of flawed evidence from its Horizon IT system. The … | Continue reading
Loving Common Lisp, or the savvy programmer's secret weapon Mark Watson. Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer’s Secret Weapon. Leanpub. 2023. While pitched as a way of sharing the author's enthusiasm for Lisp (which really shines through), this book is really a deep demons … | Continue reading
Lisp in space Lisp in space (podcast, 38 minutes) An interview on the Corecursive podcast with Ron Garret. In 1988 (when, for context, I was in the second year of my BSc) Garret started working on autonomous navigation software for Sojourner, NASA's first Mars rover, which flew i … | Continue reading
Tania Branigan (2023) It's unusual to read a book that probably couldn't have been written before or after it actually was: the political environment of China thawed just enough to give people confidence to speak to a foreign author about the events of the Cultural Revolution. Th … | Continue reading
Lisp hackers: Interviews with 100x more productive programmers Vsevolod Dyomkin. Lisp Hackers: Interviews with 100x More Productive Programmers. Leanpub. 2013. I'm not convinced by the sub-title: at the very least, there's no evidence to support the claim that Lisp programmers re … | Continue reading
My Lisp experiences and the development of GNU Emacs My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs The never-dull Richard Stallman talks about his experiences with Lisp and with the development of Emacs. It's got some useful observations on why Lisp became the core of Emac … | Continue reading
Simon Sebag Montefiore (2016) When complimented on his armies capturing Berlin at the end of the Second World War, Stalin famously replied that "Tsar Alexander made it to Paris." This book describes how, and why, that happened – and why it meant to much to Stalin, on whom Sebag M … | Continue reading
Erica Thompson (2022) A thoughtful look at modelling by an experienced climate modeller. What are models for? The most common answer would be "to predict the future behaviour of some system," but Thompson argues a far more subtle line: that the most important models often fail to … | Continue reading
How Lisp is designing nanotechnology How Lisp is designing nanotechnology (video, 52 minutes). An interview on the Developer Voices podcast with Prof Christian Schafmeister on designing enzymes using a custom dialect of Lisp to control computational chemistry libraries. He initia … | Continue reading
A micro-manual for Lisp: Not the whole truth John McCarthy. A Micro-Manual for Lisp: Not the Whole Truth. ACM SIGPLAN Notices 13, pp.215–216. 1978. A "manual" in the sense of providing a complete implementation of Lisp – in Lisp itself. Is that useful? A semantics expert would sa … | Continue reading
The Lisp machine Richard Greenblatt. The Lisp Machine. Working paper 79. MIT AI Laboratory. 1974. A description of the architecture later built and sold by LMI. A visionary description of a machine to run Lisp at a "non-prohibitive cost" of $70,000 per system. (The web tells me t … | Continue reading
Lisp for the web Adam Tornhill. Lisp for the Web. Leanpub. 2015. A short, practical guide to build a dynamic web site entirely using Common Lisp. Makes extensive use of several libraries, including the intriguingly-named hunchentoot web server (named after a never-staged musica … | Continue reading
List processing J.M. Foster. List Processing. Macdonald and Co. 1967. A slim volume discussing list processing with reference to Lisp and to other list processing systems of the time (including some libraries embedded into Fortran). The most fascinating part of the book is its … | Continue reading
Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, Part I John McCarthy. Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I. Communications of the ACM 3, pp.184–195. 1960. The original Lisp paper from 1960, which opens: … | Continue reading
Paradigms of artificial intelligence programming: Case studies in Common Lisp Peter Norvig. Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp. Morgan Kaufmann. 1992. An absolute classic of both AI and Lisp, and really two books in one. The applicat … | Continue reading
Common Lisp recipes: A problem-solution approach Edmund Weitz. Common Lisp Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach. Apress. 2016. An extensive list of recipes for using common data structures, how the differ in Lisp from the equivalents in other languages, and what novel feature … | Continue reading
The Common Lisp condition system Michał "phoe" Herda. The Common Lisp Condition System. Apress. 2020. An enormously detailed look at the condition system, sometimes regarded as the Lisp equivalent of exception-handling in other languages. But that's massively unfair to the c … | Continue reading
Anatomy of Lisp John Allen. Anatomy of Lisp. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-001115-X. 1978. This is a hard book to characterise. It's simultaneously an introduction, a collection of advanced (for the time) programming techniques, and a guide to some very low-level implementation detail … | Continue reading
TIL: Web site carbon ratings Today I learned about a site that rates web pages according to their carbon footprints. My web site does well: I'm not all that surprised by this, since I use a static site generator and minimal (almost no) JavaScript: basically as low-power as o … | Continue reading
Sasha Swire An insight into the British politics of the 2010s. And not a pretty sight.The pitch for this book is that, as a political wife, the author had a unique ringside seat from which to observe the goings-on the (mostly male) politicians. And it's true that she h … | Continue reading
John Christopher (1956) Post-apocalyptic fiction of a determinedly British kind. It's not a bad book, and has a certain complexity to it in exploring how people's attitudes might change when faced with the destruction of normal civilisation.A deadly virus destroys all … | Continue reading
Trying to refute some criticisms of Lisp I recently had a discussion with someone on Mastodon about Lisp and its perceived (by them) deficiencies as a language. There were some interesting points, but I felt I had to try to refute them, at least partially. I should say from the … | Continue reading
Local email from Office365 using OAUTH2 with mbsync I decided recently I wanted to have a more controlled email setup, with a local archive rather than relying on remote servers to keep everything. The point of this is twofold: To have a local archive of email, separate from th … | Continue reading
LISPcraft Robert Wilensky. LISPcraft. W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-95442-0. 1984. Hard to know whether to include this as an introduction or collection of applications, since it runs all the way from basic uses to pattern-matching and associative retrieval, by way of the non-list … | Continue reading
The CONNIVER reference manual Drew McDermott and Gerald Jay Sussman. The Conniver Reference Manual. Technical report AIM-259a. MIT AI Laboratory. 1974. I think Conniver may have a claim to being the most influential language you've never heard of. It's a mostly forgotten Lisp v … | Continue reading
Common Lisp: the language Guy Steele. Common Lisp: The Language. Digital Press. ISBN 1-55558-041-6. 1990. The reference manual for Common Lisp, also available online in its entirety. This is very much a reference manual and not a tutorial, but having said that it's a lot more … | Continue reading
Structure and interpretation of computer programs Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. MIT Press. 1985. A book once described (by me, actually) as "the only computer science book worth reading twice", and which was the foun … | Continue reading
Learn Common Lisp in Y minutes https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/common-lisp/ A one-web-page introduction to Common Lisp covering pretty much all the language in enough detail to at least start writing simple command-line programs (and understanding those of others). Includes m … | Continue reading
Practical Common Lisp Peter Seibel. Practical Common Lisp. Apress. ISBN 978-1-4302-0017-8. 2005. The classic, very thorough and hands-on tutorial introduction that doesn't skip the hard parts like the condition system and non-local blocks and exists (and the relationship betw … | Continue reading
TIL: An RSS-focused search engine Today I learned about feedle, a search engine focused on searching blogs and podcasts – web sites that export an RSS feed, in other words. And the search results are themselves RSS feed that can be subscribed to live. This feels like a quite a … | Continue reading
Locally overriding a function throughout a dynamic extent A horribly dangerous but occasionally useful Lisp technique. My use case is as follows. ebib has a command to copy a formatted reference to the kill ring, using citar-citeproc-format-reference to actually do the formatti … | Continue reading
Nicole Perlroth (2021) A hugely detailed and deeply researched history of the market for "zero-day: exploits, the faults and technologies underlying computer viruses and ransomware. It's a hugely complicated and technical field which Perlroth does an amazing job of ma … | Continue reading
Ha-Joon Chang (2022) A book that combines food with economics? Not really.I'm torn by this book. I enjoyed the food parts, especially the author's anecdotes about his move to the UK from Korea, and how he's observed the UK's food scene change from incredibly insular a … | Continue reading
TIL: The first scientist Today I learned that the first person ever to be called a "scientist" was the Scottish … erm, scientist Mary Sommerville (1780–1872), who made discoveries across several fields of mathematics, physics, and astronomy, and was one of the first two women ad … | Continue reading
TIL: The first ever .com domain Today I learned that the first .com internet domain registered on the internet was https://symbolics.com and belonged to Symbolics, a company that made Lisp machines. It doesn't relate to Lisp any more, of course. It's been sold to someone who "h … | Continue reading
Making small changes to lots of files I recently had to make tiny changes to a large number of files spread nested through a directory structure. This turns out to be a lot easier than I expected with Emacs. My use case was actually this blog. It's been on the go for a while in … | Continue reading
Lyn Macdonald (1978) A military and social history of the Third Battle of Ypres, heavily supported by material from the soldiers who were there – the Allied soldiers only, which is a shame, as it would have been nice to hear the defenders' perspective too.It's trite t … | Continue reading
High-degree numerical differentiation¶ Performing differentiation in a computer usually relies on numerical techniques. There are several well-known approaches to this, but all tend to suffer from numerical instability when applied many times to compute high-degree derivatives … | Continue reading
Marcus du Sautoy A world tour of the world's board (and other) games. All the usual ones are here, plus others that I guarantee will be new to everyone. The games of Africa remain under-known."Unlocking the secrets" is an overblown description of how maths comes into t … | Continue reading