Prompted by a question posed by one of my colleagues today, “has anyone ever used Lisp?”, I surprisingly found myself being the only person that had.
I played around with it many years ago after being inspired by Eric S. Raymond’s seminal article, “How to Become A Hacker” in which he explained that “getting” Lisp is equalivent to finding programming nirvana.
Whilst I didn’t quite reach those levels, I found that using Lisp was a great learning experience. Despite it being half a century old, it is still a relevant language today; the online Practical Common Lisp book contains examples of a spam filter, an ID3 tag parser and other real-world examples.
The following two links are for the curious who might wish to try it out:
Wise words taken from a list of programming epigrams from 1982:
Epigrams on Programming
A very useful article from Google’s Miško Hevery about the problems with the Singleton design pattern. Essentially, Singleton’s rely on a global instance variable which could point to any number of other variables, thus creating a global state. This causes problems when you want to test your code.
stackoverflow.com is a new project from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, intended to be “the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit”. Worth keeping an eye on…
Joe Weizenbaum, the creator of one of the earliest examples of Artificial Intelligence, has died. Weizenbaum created ELIZA, the “virtual therapist”, which I’ve played around with in various implementations over the years. It inspired me to investigate Lisp, so for that reason alone I hold Weizenbaum in high regard.
“A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind”
cyclotram: Joe Weizenbaum dead at 85. ELIZA in denial.