I do not have strong feelings about XML, be it for or against it. I don’t use it much because I use either S-Expressions with Scheme or Lua tables with Lua. I believe XML can be helpful, but people need to know how to use it. I have come across an application of XML to [...]
The XII Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages is going to be happen in my home city of Fortaleza, on August 27th-29th. The programme looks very promising, with sessions about Software Transaction Memory in Haskell, concurrency with Lua (with the main architect of Lua, Roberto Ierusalimschy from PUC-Rio) and an invited talk of Shriram Krishnamurthi, the [...]
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 [...]
Browsing the web today I found an interesting poster about programming paradigms. Interestingly, it puts Java right there with OCaml in the state + closures section, and Java does not have closures. But since there is no OOP in the poster, I assume the author is equaling closures to objects, which according to some is [...]
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 [...]