CIEL Is an Extended Lisp. Scripting with batteries included.

Recently I’ve discovered a very interesting language / realization of the Lambda Calculus. I was unable to find any other language like it, which I find quite surprising. In hindsight, the language seems obvious and natural. And the language keeps surprising me. I say “discovered” in the same sense that Paul Graham says that McCarthy “discovered Lisp”

One of the distinguishing features of Lisp and Scheme is the ability to define macros that allow you to extend the base language with new language constructs. Here are two examples what this actually means and why this is a good idea.

The Medley system was created at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC was the cradle of the modern graphical user interface and its design thinking continued with the development of Medley Interlisp, an extensible graphical operating system with nearly limitless possibilities for customization. Whatever the task, using Medley you can design a custom workflow to help accomplish it.

This book is intended to get you, the reader, programming quickly in Common Lisp. Although the Lisp programming language is often associated with artificial intelligence, this introduction is on general Common Lisp programming techniques. Later we will look at general example applications and artificial intelligence examples.

Juno is a self-hosted Lisp dialect that compiles to JavaScript. It combines fast execution and ease of use with features such as a macro facility modeled on Common Lisp and the ability to save and restore the running image. Juno provides a Lisp computing environment for JavaScript platforms: the browser, Deno or Node (ala V8), or similar, without requiring any dependencies except the JavaScript container itself.

A blog about the whole ecosystem of PicoLisp - tutorials, real-world projects, functional programming theory.

Nicely searchable Verizon of the hyperspec.

Okay so I didn’t actually make a game in Janet. I played with Janet and Raylib for a few weeks, learned a lot about graphics stuff, but decided to stop working on it before I made anything actually playable. Mostly because, well, it was taking up far too much of my time and I have more important things to work on.

The APL programming language (a subset thereof) compiling to Common Lisp.

We propose an abstract computer model and a programming language–Psi-Lisp–whose primitive operations are injective and hence reversible, thus allowing arbitrary undoing without the overheads of checkpointing. Such a computer can be built from reversible conservative logic circuits, with the serendipitous advantage of dissipating far less heat than traditional Boolean AND/OR/NOT circuits. Unlike functional languages, which have one “state” for all times, Psi-Lisp has at all times one “state”, with unique predecessor and successor states.

Dak is a Lisp like language that transpiles to JavaScript.

My friend Zyni pointed out that someone has been getting really impressively confused and cross on reddit about empty lists, booleans and so on in Common Lisp, which led us to a discussion about what the differences between CL and Scheme really are here.

A collection of small functions to help make Racket code simpler & more readable. Well, according to me, anyhow.

Qi is a hosted language on the Racket platform. If you don’t already have Racket installed, you will need to install it. Then, install Qi at the command line using:

A quick guide to Emacs Lisp programming

Hassam: What would be your advice to young people today who want to get into the field of designing programming languages? Dr. Fahlman: Don’t! Unless you like to do this as a hobby. What I came to understand, after years of work on Common Lisp and the death of Dylan, the ongoing popularity of the hideous C++, and the rise of Java, is that programming languages don’t become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility.