Macros are an indispensable programming feature. While procedures (functions, methods, messages etc.) let developers reuse common computation patterns, macros allow the abstraction of common syntactic constructions. These constructions can be as simple as a new control operator, or can be full domain-specific languages. For instance, there is no when operator in Scheme, but a lot [...]
I believe I have got the first Scheme application past Apple review into the iTunes App Store. It is yet another Reversi clone, called Reverso. It is a combination of 90% Scheme and 10% Objective-C, written with Gambit-C Scheme. James Long has already shown how to compile Gambit-C for the iPhone, and I started from [...]
By this point I believe it’s clear that I am a big fan of Scheme. Lately I have seen a sharp rise of interest in Ruby in some virtual places I attend (#lisp-br, twitter, IM with coworkers etc.). I am sure Ruby is a fine language, even in spite of several complaints I hear from [...]
There will be presentations about Lisp in the V Latin America Conference on Free Software, via call-with-hopeless-continuation.
Doing some research about compilers, interpreters and virtual machines, I have gathered some bibliography from several resources. Here it is, in no particular order: Essentials of Programming Languages, by Daniel P. Friedman, Mitchell Wand and Christopher T. Haynes Programming Language Pragmatics, by Michael L. Scott Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation, by Adele Goldberg and [...]
And anyway, the subject line presupposes that Lisp has not caught on. This is like saying that astrophysics or calculus or brain surgery has not caught on because in relative numbers, there might be more people doing other things. The success of Lisp is not measured in the number of people using it, it’s measured [...]
As part of my Lisp studies, I have implemented a toy Scheme interpreter in roughly 1000 lines of Lua. It is here. It supports tail-call optimisation, lexical scope for closures, and first-class continuations via call/cc. I have departed from the traditional approach of implementing a Scheme interpreter in Scheme itself because I wanted to avoid [...]
I am currently reading the third chapter of Lisp in Small Pieces. It is really a wonderful book. By teaching how to implement Lisp, it teaches a lot about using the language too. Moreover, reading it sometimes I feel the urge that almost every Schemer has at one time or another felt: The urge to [...]
While I wait for my 1-hour mobile phone software compilation to finish I decided to drop a quick post about something that has been on my mind lately. In his nice PhD thesis (that I had to read five times to finally understand it), Dybvig (the implementor of Chez Scheme) shows a compiler that rewards [...]
One of the most promoted features of the Lisp dialects is how easy it is to create Domain Specific Languages with them. It is said that a Lisp programmer creates a language for the domain of his problem and then solves the problem as a particular case. That is why a lone developer or a [...]