#lisp programming

[el-ffej]

I partake of a slightly different superstition:

Forget to close a parenthesis -----> You're going to Hell.

(I blame it on LISP programming at an early age.)

Forgot to close a parenthesis and now spirits enter me like a waterslide

[laejoh]

A blacksmith uses tongs to manipulate work that would otherwise be too hot to handle. You don't want to drop a piece of hot steel, so you'd like your tongs to be a good fit on your work. Find some tongs that are an approximate fit and stick them in the fire to get good and hot. When they have softened, put the hot tongs around the cold workpiece and tap them into shape with your hammer. Voila! Custom tongs.

When I first saw this trick I was quite amused. It reminded me of Lisp programming

[hydralisk98]

GruvboxHypathy

Lets build a future to be proud of and grateful to live into. And I think that one way I can do so is to produce insightful explainers and creative tutorials...

Nth BRAINDUMP

Medium Light + Soft Dark Gruvbox, very dark night with dim yet soft & warm lights, Shoshona the black Angora housecat, solarpunk, 16^12, witchy coven commune, walking her way to her own home library, forested library location, night, hoof shoes, black gloves (giving the blackhand surname), relaxing 45rpm 7" vinyls’ music, bell thousers, jackets / blouse, black lipstick, white hoof shoes, daybreak / dusk, black sun, stargazing, retro warm grunge look with black white and amber tones, large backpack, amber polka dot patterned identity card, libre cyberware & libre bio-modding wares, GLOSS (gratis, libre, open source software / culture), olive & black net socks texture, soft woolen rug texture, notepad at her hand, soundscape of a forested park library with some river nearby, cozy vibe of curiosity and knowledge-seeking…

Some majestic Lisp poetry & code booklets on the shelves, puffy layered turtleneck shirt and bell cap trousers, Olive Synod Mixnet library card, autistic fem symbol talisman, keychain charms, analog medium, retro computers, axis victory?, anti-Wilsonism, Strasserism, Shoshoni language, conlangs, alternate technologies, mysticism, communion, community building, honest humble living, witch coven, STEM ladies, Chronokinesis, True Polymorphs, Toymaker, open culture, public domain, copyleft, desktop environmental storytelling, REPL feedback loops, Lisp symbolic computation machines, addventure, neo-brutalism, systemic change, historical retrospective, from grim dark to bright solarpunk, Konrad Zuse, factions, far far away future foresight, van hexcrawl, encyclopedic knowledge, life-long learning, Zettelkasten, Markdown, Argdown, DolDoc, Parade FS, DocBook, HTML, XML, SVG toons, Common Lisp, Worker Cooperatives, KDE_Plasma’s ecosystem;

Neue-Geo-Syndicalist constructivist empowerment worldview, Lisp program forms as Lisp-y poetry, shortwave radio, geofiction realms & speculative paracosms, constructed languages’ jargon / dialects and technological ecosystems…

Harmony, Progress, Liberty, Knowledge, Mysticism & Rationality syncretized, Data Transparency, Copyleft / Open Culture Movement as in GLOSS, Geosyndicalism (Georgism* mixed with Belle Epoque Syndicalism), Respect & Courtesy, Linguistic Diversity... ;

[yarrowleef]

i wish more people would make audiobooks/podfics of their warrior cat fanfics. i want to hear other peoples OC stories but i also dont rly like reading on screens. and i want to multitask.

i've looked on youtube a couple times but i can only find joke readings of "bad" old fics. or very young kids recording their first stories, which, y'know, good for them but that's not quite what i'm looking for lol

are there other places that host podfics other than youtube that i don't know about??

[jazzslug]

my first scheme program!! its just a simple four function calculator, but it was fun to figure out :3

i think ill continue learning scheme some more!

[watchmorecinema]

Normally I just post about movies but I'm a software engineer by trade so I've got opinions on programming too.

Apparently it's a month of code or something because my dash is filled with people trying to learn Python. And that's great, because Python is a good language with a lot of support and job opportunities. I've just got some scattered thoughts that I thought I'd write down.

Python abstracts a number of useful concepts. It makes it easier to use, but it also means that if you don't understand the concepts then things might go wrong in ways you didn't expect. Memory management and pointer logic is so damn annoying, but you need to understand them. I learned these concepts by learning C++, hopefully there's an easier way these days.

Data structures and algorithms are the bread and butter of any real work (and they're pretty much all that come up in interviews) and they're language agnostic. If you don't know how to traverse a linked list, how to use recursion, what a hash map is for, etc. then you don't really know how to program. You'll pretty much never need to implement any of them from scratch, but you should know when to use them; think of them like building blocks in a Lego set.

Learning a new language is a hell of a lot easier after your first one. Going from Python to Java is mostly just syntax differences. Even "harder" languages like C++ mostly just mean more boilerplate while doing the same things. Learning a new spoken language in is hard, but learning a new programming language is generally closer to learning some new slang or a new accent. Lists in Python are called Vectors in C++, just like how french fries are called chips in London. If you know all the underlying concepts that are common to most programming languages then it's not a huge jump to a new one, at least if you're only doing all the most common stuff. (You will get tripped up by some of the minor differences though. Popping an item off of a stack in Python returns the element, but in Java it returns nothing. You have to read it with Top first. Definitely had a program fail due to that issue).

The above is not true for new paradigms. Python, C++ and Java are all iterative languages. You move to something functional like Haskell and you need a completely different way of thinking. Javascript (not in any way related to Java) has callbacks and I still don't quite have a good handle on them. Hardware languages like VHDL are all synchronous; every line of code in a program runs at the same time! That's a new way of thinking.

Python is stereotyped as a scripting language good only for glue programming or prototypes. It's excellent at those, but I've worked at a number of (successful) startups that all were Python on the backend. Python is robust enough and fast enough to be used for basically anything at this point, except maybe for embedded programming. If you do need the fastest speed possible then you can still drop in some raw C++ for the places you need it (one place I worked at had one very important piece of code in C++ because even milliseconds mattered there, but everything else was Python). The speed differences between Python and C++ are so much smaller these days that you only need them at the scale of the really big companies. It makes sense for Google to use C++ (and they use their own version of it to boot), but any company with less than 100 engineers is probably better off with Python in almost all cases. Honestly thought the best programming language is the one you like, and the one that you're good at.

Design patterns mostly don't matter. They really were only created to make up for language failures of C++; in the original design patterns book 17 of the 23 patterns were just core features of other contemporary languages like LISP. C++ was just really popular while also being kinda bad, so they were necessary. I don't think I've ever once thought about consciously using a design pattern since even before I graduated. Object oriented design is mostly in the same place. You'll use classes because it's a useful way to structure things but multiple inheritance and polymorphism and all the other terms you've learned really don't come into play too often and when they do you use the simplest possible form of them. Code should be simple and easy to understand so make it as simple as possible. As far as inheritance the most I'm willing to do is to have a class with abstract functions (i.e. classes where some functions are empty but are expected to be filled out by the child class) but even then there are usually good alternatives to this.

Related to the above: simple is best. Simple is elegant. If you solve a problem with 4000 lines of code using a bunch of esoteric data structures and language quirks, but someone else did it in 10 then I'll pick the 10. On the other hand a one liner function that requires a lot of unpacking, like a Python function with a bunch of nested lambdas, might be easier to read if you split it up a bit more. Time to read and understand the code is the most important metric, more important than runtime or memory use. You can optimize for the other two later if you have to, but simple has to prevail for the first pass otherwise it's going to be hard for other people to understand. In fact, it'll be hard for you to understand too when you come back to it 3 months later without any context.

Note that I've cut a few things for simplicity. For example: VHDL doesn't quite require every line to run at the same time, but it's still a major paradigm of the language that isn't present in most other languages.

Ok that was a lot to read. I guess I have more to say about programming than I thought. But the core ideas are: Python is pretty good, other languages don't need to be scary, learn your data structures and algorithms and above all keep your code simple and clean.

[infinitemonkeytheory]

Rufus

(he keeps peeing where he shouldn’t, so he’s currently on the naughty step (he has a vet appointment for tomorrow to figure out what his deal is (surely 4 litter boxes (and we’ve had as many as 7) are enough?? (I spend what feels like a disproportionate amount of time every day cleaning up after cats (they’re lucky they’re cute)))))

[piratesexmachine420]

Something something "time traveler moves a rock" something something IDK I thought it was funny. Total nonsense though.

based on listing 20-2 of The Rust Book

[femmys-textbook-notes]

— Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman, foreword by Alan J. Perlis

[fractangle]

Prev you'll like an old project of mine: I made a tiny thing along these lines a number of years ago - a walnut and brass case for a lil battery-powered raspberry pi with a tiny screen! It's nowhere near as fancy or as polished as the above, but there's a... familial resemblance I guess?

[hydralisk98]

What about programming a "sly Lisp" Mal-based DSL called Lepio? (16^12 sideline thread, article 0x32)

Finally doing some follow-up to the suggestions outline in the hyperlinked post right below, at least for the meantime of me figuring out how to make WolvenKit 8+ work on my PC:

hydralisk98

In a nutshell, boils down to observing with Wireshark, CLI programs, open access codebases, & using adequate syntax highlighting previews inside of code editors. Which is handy advice for the query as far as "someone doing something technical", and great basis before jumping into the nuances of my constructed world detailing. Thanks again @moose-mousse for the insights, really appreciative of them (& you) still.

Still, I am still recovering momentum but at least skimmed a couple key posts in my own 16^12 threads I forgot about, so I am gaining some of such once more.

Back to the article topic, as much as I do enjoy the present worldscape of ours + its history and understand to a fair extent why it went down that way, I felt like I could explore / iterate / derive some really amazing feats manifestation-wise through my 1612 setting and its Angora planetary focal point. And while I do have plenty of special interest research topics to document (like religious traditions, civilizational linguistics, ideologues, other technological branches...), I felt like experimenting through smaller chunks of data at a time would be best for creative throughput / consistency purposes.

And wanting to expand upon my IT skills into a killer portfolio, I feel like starting with some technical explorations would be best.

Just wanna make sure though, whom would be interested into that sorta deal, either in text (next indieweb personal site), audio (not sure which copyleft host service to choose tbh) or video form (Odysee-first)?

Will develop more on the details to explore a bit later, take great care of yourselves until then! Or else...

[technotalk]

I'm back

Oh wow, it's been 5 years since last post.

This time I plan to use this little corner of mine on Tumblr to share about LISP programming languages (be it Racket, Clojure, Common Lisp etc)

[lunachats]

thinking abt that time i added an rb tree based associative array to a tiny lisp dialect. not exactly the smartest thing ive done but maybe it was worth it. yknow to see the trees printed out with their keys in alphabetical/numeric/creation order for strings/numbers/symbols. very Satisfying...

[kakajoju]

Had two exams last week that I felt I absolutely bombed so my mental state was..... not good for the past few days (I don't handle academic failure well, yeah).

Thankfully, they were lenient with the first one (that one set me off the hardest tbh) so I passed.

And in the second one I was one of the top scorers actually??? Lmao literally found it funny after I saw that 95/100 bcs I thought my score would be barely passing-

[piratesexmachine420]

One of the days it's gonna be the year of Lisp on the desktop.

...one of these days...