I've been #reading the #Lisp in Small Pieces book, and it has helped me put names to a lot of concepts that I knew about Lisps and programming language design/implementation in general. It also provides a great historical perspective to #PLT, especially by mentioning all approaches that were tried but abandoned.

But other than being very very verbose, I find it hard to understand because it keeps changing the model of the #interpreter every chapter. It starts with using Alists to model environments, then uses objects in the next chapter for the same, and in the next one, switches to using closures.

I get that it does this to showcase all possible ways of modelling an interpreter in Lisp, but it is quite disorienting to me as a reader.

#programming #ProgrammingLanguages

But I can't say that the author didn't forewarn me. This is literally the fourth sentence of the book:

“To explain these entities, their origin, their variations, this book will go into great detail.”

It is a decent read, though the language feels a little outdated. It is translated from French so that may be the reason of the overly magniloquent language.

#Lisp #PLT #programming #ProgrammingLanguages

And of course, a fault that all old academic textbooks tend to suffer from: a lack of letters in variable names, like so:

```lisp
(define (evaluate-variable n r s k) (k (s (r n)) s) )
```

#Lisp #PLT #programming #ProgrammingLanguages

the more #lisp i do the more i have the feeling that development of software was heading in such a wrong direction.

@screwlisp is having some site connectivity problems so asked me to remind everyone that we'll be on the anonradio forum at the top of the hour (a bit less than ten minutes hence) for those who like that kind of thing:

https://anonradio.net:8443/anonradio

He'll also be monitoring LambdaMOO at "telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888" for those who do that kind of thing. there are also emacs clients you should get if you're REALLY using telnet.

Topic for today, I'm told, may include the climate, the war, the oil price hikes, some rambles I've recently posted on CLIM, and the book by @cdegroot called The Genius of Lisp, which we'll also revisit again next week.

cc @ramin_hal9001

#LispyGopher #Gopher #Lisp #CommonLisp

Reposting my old diagram of #commonlisp implementations

#lisp

Alt...

Graph of Common Lisp implementations

Sup Fedi,

I want to get indoctrinated into the world of #LISP

I am not a programmer, nor software developer. I am familiar with basic shell scripting and a little bit of C but that's about it.

Where does the internet church of Lisp congregate and how do I become a member?

Please boost
Thanks

@neauoire we need to normalize Lisp fan art like this.

#lisp

Alt...

A surrealist collage depicting a human profile in side view, overlaid with mechanical engravings, pink stars, and the names of early programming languages, Fortran, Lisp, and Pascal evoking the dawn of computer science.

Right, problems for today. First. #Lisp problems. I think the bug in `cond` fires when a clause succeeds but returns `nil`.

First, write a unit test which checks for that, but run that test on my laptop where it physically cannot generate millions of stack frames.

Second, rewrite `cond` to call a separate helper function, `cond_clause`, which takes one arg and returns `nil` on failure, `(t . val)` on success, where `val` is the value to be returned by `cond`.

/Continued

Oh no! I've read the https://stevelosh.com/blog/2021/03/small-common-lisp-cli-programs/ and see the new horizons of tinkering

#CommonLisp #lisp

RE: https://mstdn.ca/@cdegroot/116086771614712320

A new Lisp book is always something to celebrate and this one doubly so, as Cees de Groot @cdegroot didn't hold back code and technical details from the book. More details here:

Landing page of the book
https://berksoft.ca/gol

Why I wrote The Genius of Lisp
https://cdegroot.com/programming/lisp/2026/02/17/why-i-wrote-the-genius-of-lisp.html

Free sample with the Table of Contents (Amazon)
https://read.amazon.com/sample/1069886416?clientId=share

#lisp #CommonLisp #books #retrocomputing

AodeRelay boosted

Cees de Groot » 🌐 2026-02-17
@cdegroot@mstdn.ca

Well, today is the day. I'm finally "sorta happy enough to pull the trigger" on publishing the book I've been working on for a very long time. It's a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for "tech-adjacent" and "tech-interested" people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy in 1958 and today still going strong (to the extent that many people see it as the most powerful programming language in existence).

And this is a time for shameless self promotion, even if you don't plan on buying the book, please repost :-). Self-publishing is self-marketing, so there we go.

If you do buy and read it, please let me know how you liked it!

The book landing page, https://berksoft.ca/gol, has links to all outlets where you can buy the book,

Alt...

Cover of "The Genius of Lisp" book.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2VAYZE_4wRJi_vgpjsH75kMhN4KsuzR_

#lisp
#programming

It's been a while I refreshed my pinned #introduction toot, and I figured today will be a fitting day to write a new one.

Hi! Despite the avatar, I'm not a furry

1

, I'm a boring cishet white dude. Despite my privileged status, I might be considered a "terrorist"

2

in some weird jurisdictions, and some companies

3

will consider me a "malicious actor", because I built myself a crawler defense system that serves them an infinite maze of garbage. To them, I say: fuck you. I'm a Vengeful Mouse.

I also have the privilege of being able to admire the human body in all shapes and forms, even such "grotesque" things as a female presenting nipple (like this one: , not to be confused with the , an entirely different and totally not grotesque thing). I wish this was the norm, rather than a privilege.

I'm a serial drive-by contributor, I have my fingerprints all over the internet. I have code in #QMK, #Kaleidoscope, and #Chrysalis, but I contributed to #Forgejo, #niri, and a whole lot of other things too. I find great joy in playing with new things, and submitting patches or other contributions. I used to be a #Debian developer, I've put #Hy in production, and lately I've been building #NixOS configurations not only as a literate #OrgMode document, with with #OrgRoam. I am extremely normal and neurotypical.

Apart from these very normal things, I use #NixOS to boot into #Emacs, which is the real operating system I use, like a very sane, completely neurotypical person would. I also tend to live-toot (very verbosely) all kinds of shenanigans I'm up to, because I always forget I have a blog.

While I do wrangle code for a living in a variety of languages (in whatever language necessary, I'm a generalist! But if I can choose, I turn to #Rust, although #Lisp languages are also very dear to me), if it were up to me, I'd much prefer wrangling other kinds of words

4

than programming language symbols. Sadly, we're not living in a world that makes possible, so I had no choice but become a #luddite and so can you.

But I'm not all about tech

5

! I'm also Dad to wonderful Twins, and Husband to my Wife, who not only puts up with my crazy, but gently

6

fans the flames too. I may occassionally toot about #parenting, too.

I may or may not have an unhealthy addiction to footnotes

7

.

1. Nope, I'm not in denial stage, I do not work in infosec. ↩︎

2. I'm anti-fascist. ↩︎

3. Like Anthropic. ↩︎

4. Short stories like this toot, or The Tragedy of Byr (which might need an explanation to really understand what's going on). ↩︎

5. I wish I could leave tech, really. ↩︎

6. Where "gently" is either an eyeroll and more wood thrown onto the campfire, or straight up lighting up the neighbourhood, figuratively speaking. ↩︎

7. ...if you haven't noticed yet... ↩︎

Once again I've went a little overboard. The program now can navigate dynamically computed content, like a filesystem.

#mcclim #lisp

HELLO! My #opensource #lisp game Kandria is now out on GOG with a 70% discount (highest ever!) to go along with it:

https://www.gog.com/en/game/kandria

#commonlisp #indiedev #gamedev

sysp: Systems Lisp compiling to C with homoiconic macros, refcounted memory, Hindley-Milner type inference https://lobste.rs/s/d4y8rq #lisp
https://github.com/karans4/sysp

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=> ./le-mie-disavventure-con-una-sveglia-2.gmi Prosegue da qui

Dunque tutto era ben organizzato; il software era pronto, l'hardware era stato acquistato e adesso dovevo solo aspettare che venisse assemblato.

#lisp #sveglia #DIY #raspberrypi #geminiprotocol
gemini://omg.pebcak.club/~cage/archive/le-mie-disavventure-con-una-sveglia-3.gmi
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini//omg.pebcak.club/~cage/archive/le-mie-disavventure-con-una-sveglia-3.gmi

Oh yes, just what I was looking for
This chemical reaction will surely fix my stumpwm setup

#lisp

Alt...

Picture of Google's AI explaining an error then suggestion a YouTube video on how to balance a chemical reaction

I'm reading "Presentation Based User Interfaces", the dissertation and later revisions in which Eugene Ciccarelli laid the foundations of GUI frameworks such as Dynamic Windows of Symbolics Genera and CLIM.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6946

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41161/AI_WP_219.pdf

#retrocomputing #lisp #CLIM #CommonLisp

The Symbolics Lisp Machine can be seen in the Lisp Assembly #39c3 #lisp

@alwayscurious @vashti define fast. I can compute the factorial of 1,000 in under one millisecond on an ordinary laptop in several different #Lisp dialects, without optimisation.

Is that not fast enough for you?

https://gist.github.com/simon-brooke/fcb59705950c5ad515e18fba065510ae

@svw @alwayscurious @vashti from the cons space usage I'm guessing that was the recursive algorithm? If so, the more impressive. Small #Lisp imlementations tend not to have dynamic stack. But allocating and deallocating stack frames on a dynamic stack is a time cost.

Eh, pls #boost my request to #getfedihired, if you could spare two clicks? 🥺

I've been humming and hawing about posting this, it feels strange, something about generational guilt & working class shame & ... but it's either this or start putting my CV through LLMs to include every buzzword on the listing I'm applying to. I haven't been able to stomach that, even though I presume that's a lot of my competition.

I simply can't get to an interview. Historically, I've done three interviews and got the job each time, because I'm a real human being who is friendly and chatty and presents himself sincerely (or, that's my guess, anyway).

#Christmas miracles appreciated!

In #Ireland with my partner, but we've lived in different places and would move happily. I've a year experience doing an IT support role the last year, but have transitioned to this stuff later than usual.

Before I've done: bartender; bicycle courier for Deliveroo in #Berlin for two years (best job ever); private tutor for five years in #Lyon (mostly piano but also maths, Irish, English, flute, tin whistle); bookies clerk for a short period; a few other odd bits - one highlight was writing reviews for a theatre company.

Oh, very comfortably fluent in #French, pretty fluent in #Irish (my first love), and intermediate #German (which I would love to have a chance to go back speaking and learning).

Tech-wise, it's been mostly on the #Linux / #Emacs / #Lisp side of things. I would happily work on anything that is one or more of challenging, interesting, useful, or moral.

Money doesn't rule me. I want to live with a humane level of comfort, that's all.

CVs and references available, DMs open. Thanks so much for any and all help!

@vashti and this is why we shouldn't store numbers in fixed width fields, or compute using 32 or 64 or 128 bit or any other fixed size integers.

Bignum arithmetic has been a solved problem in computing since Maclisp in the 1960s.

#Lisp

I was looking for an Emacs Lisp book that covers how to customize and extend the Emacs environment in Lisp, not just the language or the editor, and a new edition of this book crossed my feeds. I guess I have something to read over the winter holydays.

https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2025-12-10-emacs-lisp-elements-book-version-2

https://protesilaos.com/emacs/emacs-lisp-elements

#EmacsLisp #lisp #emacs

I'm solving #AdventOfCode this year in #Janet #Lisp. See my solutions for the days 5–8: https://abhinavsarkar.net/notes/2025-aoc-2/

#blogging #programming

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=> ./le-mie-disavventure-con-una-sveglia.gmi Prosegue da qui

Dopo aver scritto il software seguendo i principi di semplicità ed essenzialità che contraddistinguono la filosofia KISS.

#lisp #sveglia #DIY #raspberrypi #geminiprotocol
gemini://omg.pebcak.club/~cage/archive/le-mie-disavventure-con-una-sveglia-2.gmi
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini//omg.pebcak.club/~cage/archive/le-mie-disavventure-con-una-sveglia-2.gmi

Cees de Groot @cdegroot explains what Common Lisp library building and packaging problems ASDF and Quicklisp solve. A clear overview of these tools and what they do.

https://cdegroot.com/programming/commonlisp/2025/11/26/cl-ql-asdf.html

#asdf #quicklisp #CommonLisp #lisp

@randomgeek

#emacs #emacslisp #lisp

Alt...

"HAVE TO LEARN EMACS LISP" Geordi LaForge disapproves. "GET TO LEARN EMACS LISP" Geordi LaForge approves.

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@interlisp/115643739371363748

If you always wanted to try out a Lisp Machine environment, but felt overwhelmed and didn't know where to start, the Medley Interlisp primer is for you.

The primer gently guides you into using the system and developing simple programs, even if you have no prior knowledge of Lisp. Plus, as the document also explains, you can run the actual environment.

https://primer.interlisp.org

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@metalisp/115640235844049539

A new Lisp discussion forum. Lispers hang out at various online venues but this new community effort may appeal to those who, like me, aren't into chat-based systems and prefer to stay away from Reddit and other proprietary or closed platforms.

I joined the forum, let's see how it goes.

https://community.metalisp.dev

#CommonLisp #lisp #forum

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Dovete sapere che io avevo una radiosveglia da comodino, era una bella radiosveglia con la ricezione digitale, uno schermo persino troppo luminoso e un altoparlante dotato di buon volume. L'unico grosso problema è che la configurazione dell'allarme constava, per quanto riguarda la periodicità dello stesso, di tre opzioni:

* allarme che si attiva ogni giorno;
* allarme che si attiva solo i giorni feriali;

#lisp #sveglia #DIY #raspberrypi #geminiprotocol
gemini://omg.pebcak.club/~cage/archive/le-mie-disavventure-con-una-sveglia.gmi
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini//omg.pebcak.club/~cage/archive/le-mie-disavventure-con-una-sveglia.gmi

Reading¹ my second short introduction to a programming language book this year "Janet for Mortals" https://janet.guide by @ianthehenry. #Janet (https://janet-lang.org) is a #Clojure like #Lisp that can be interpreted, embedded and compiled, and comes with a large standard library with concurrency and PEG parser support. I must say it is very appealing to me. #programmingLanguages

¹ First one was "Learning Zig" https://www.openmymind.net/learning_zig

Very much enjoyed (finally) reading this today (while procrastinating from other things I was supposed to be doing). The paper is in PDF form, here:

https://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200607.pdf

Title is "Bicycles for the Mind Have to Be See-Through".

Anyone with a passing interest in #lisp, #forth, or #smalltalk has some very interesting material to chew on. And the @malleablesys people too, but I presume they've seen it over on the forum, where I first became aware of it myself.

The idea as I understood it is, to quote the paper, to "prioritize comprehension over ease of authorship". And bring that to the whole software stack, and see how far you can push it.

@akkartik where is the whole project at now, how is it all going? I only eyeballed the source code, but the rationale behind the whole thing was very interesting.

One more quote from the end:

"Creating an entire new stack may seem like tilting at windmills, but the mainstream Software-Industrial Complex suffers from obvious defects even in the eyes of those who don’t share our philosophy."

When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.

I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.

I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:

#Coding #SoftwareDevelopment #ProgrammingLanguages #8086Assembly #BASIC #C #Pascal #perl #java #scala #LISP #Scheme #Prolog #Mathematica #ObjectiveC #matlab #octave #R #Python #Fortran #COBOL #Haskell #Clean #Flix #Curry #Factor #Unison #Joy #Idris #Agda #Lean #6502Assembly