Posted in workfriendly, programming, scheme, factor, forth on Sep 28th, 2007 No Comments »
Last year I embarked on somwhat of a journey to find a better language for my home projects after getting a bit frustrated by python’s lack of blocks and general cruftyness. After a couple of months of trying various different things I settled on Gambit Scheme for my spare-time data indexing project. A minimal core […]
Posted in General, programming, scheme, gambit on Jul 25th, 2007 1 Comment »
Gambit scheme lacks a profiler that can profile scheme with embedded C code. (There’s statprof, but unfortunately it doesn’t profile embeded C). I needed to do this pretty desperately for my triple indexing stuff so I’ve written a simple macro which takes wall clock timings of functions and accumulates them.
You replace ‘define’ with ‘define-timed’ […]
Posted in scheme, gambit on May 23rd, 2007 2 Comments »
One of the first things I wrote when I was in the ‘nesting’* phase of learning gambit scheme was a unittest DSL. Part of this was that I wanted an excuse to use r5rs syntax-rules macros, but the real motivation was that I’d been seduced by the idea of using tests for documentation ala Nat […]
Posted in programming, lisp, scheme, gambit on Apr 21st, 2007 1 Comment »
One of the first issues I had when evaluating scheme as a possible replacement for Python as my hobby language was its apparent lack of module/library/namespace system. How do people possibly build big programs? I wondered.
Now it turns out most (all?) scheme implementations have features to deal with modules and libraries. Gambit’s is particularly nebulous […]
Posted in programming, lisp, scheme, gambit on Apr 21st, 2007 No Comments »
Somebody asked me about gambit-c the other day, and why I was using that as opposed to some other language or runtime for my own-time coding stuff.
Despite the scheme language being all cool, the thing that really made his eyes light up was the C features in gambit (it is called gambit-c for a reason). […]
Posted in lisp, scheme on Mar 29th, 2007 2 Comments »
Finally, it’s starting to feel like I’m getting the hang of the lisp style. The key for me seems to be in re-reading the contents of srfi-1 every time I think I need a loop.
Posted in workfriendly, programming, lisp, scheme on Feb 28th, 2007 No Comments »
Pascal Costanza nails the point of macros.
(and illustrates why lispers actually like lisp’s strange syntax so much)
Posted in General, programming, scheme on Feb 21st, 2007 2 Comments »
I recently had my work laptop nicked while I was in paris, so I’ve had to reconstruct my linux development environment on another laptop. That reminded me that I intended to document this stuff since I had to dig around a bit for it when I first picked up scheme a few months ago.
Things I […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, lisp, scheme, refactoring on Oct 8th, 2006 No Comments »
I’m still perservering with Gambit scheme, and progressing pretty slowly it has to be said. The first thing I’ve been missing is the lack of refactoring tools for scheme.
I wrote the basic python refactoring functionality in bicyclerepairman a long while ago, and having it as part of my daily toolset has strongly influenced the way […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, lisp, scheme on Sep 19th, 2006 4 Comments »
I’ve been battling again with Scheme recently.
Having spent the last couple of months playing with various languages, I’ve come to the conclusion that scheme is the only one that has any real possibility of becoming my next ‘general purpose language’. Python held that crown for many years, but its lack of blocks and concurrency caused […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, lisp, scheme on Sep 14th, 2006 No Comments »
This just in:
The R6RS draft is out! The 6th revision of the scheme language, and it looks like it fills the language’s biggest holes: namely a standard library module system, unicode strings and standardized exception/condition api. Hurrah!
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, lisp, scheme on Aug 2nd, 2006 3 Comments »
Joel Spolski rattles the java cage a second time, illustrating that:
Java is really bad at functional programming
Functional programming is really important for utilizing massively parallel hardware
In particular I like the way Spolski uses Javascript for his examples. The conception of this language has always been a bit of an enigma to me, especially given […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, lisp, scheme on Jul 20th, 2006 2 Comments »
The Lisp style has been really trying my sense of aesthetic.
Yesterday I got really hung up on the fact that I prefer the ‘message-passing’ approach to OO rather than the ‘call a function and pass in the object as an arg’ style. The latter just feels clumsy to me.
Then it occurred to me that lisp […]
Posted in workfriendly, programming, lisp, scheme on Jul 10th, 2006 3 Comments »
I’ve been reading ‘The Little Schemer‘ (a new edition of ‘The Little LISPer’) and ‘The Seasoned Schemer’ recently, recommended to me by JP (who (of course!) has a signed copy of the original). This is classic text, with the first edition of ‘lisper’ appearing in the 70s. The striking thing about these books isn’t […]
