I thought I would do a brain-dump about something in the computing world that has interested me for a long time: the Lisp programming language, or family of languages. Lisp, in it’s various forms, is known as a language with a passionate but small following, which has never reached the level of industry adoption of […]
Category: Programming
Hackers & English Majors
Like many software developers, I occasionally take a peek at Hacker News and look for the odd headline that catches my eye. Like many people my age, I spent a lot of time playing text-based and point-and-click adventure games on a PC in the 90’s. Recently, there was a serendipitous collision between these interests when […]
Don’t Panic!
I occasionally like to dip my toes into the world of productivity techniques, something I think worth doing while keeping in mind that you can spend all day researching productivity while getting nothing done. I’ve found that there is a very useful productivity program that comes as part of my favorite programming text editor, that […]
On Being Curious
Those of us who have decided to enter the rewarding—and occasionally frustrating and exhausting—profession of software development know that learning is a daily requirement, a subject I have written about before. If you include yourself in that description, you also know how quickly you see the limits of your knowledge of the field recede before […]
On Text Editors
There is an interesting dichotomy in the tech world: innovation is constant, yet there are widely used technologies that bear a strong resemblance to what developers were working with thirty or forty years ago. We still have sed and awk. Fortran is still used for some purposes. We still use terminal emulators based on the […]
Useful Abstractions
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” So goes the quote attributed to Einstein. This is excellent advice for programmers, but the last part should be especially noted. How do you know when you’ve reached that point at which things can’t be made simpler? And once you know, or think you […]
How I Learn
I learned to code late. It was not until around the time I graduated with my bachelor’s degree that my interest in programming began, and I started that journey with everything to learn. Now that I’ve been programming professionally for over a decade, there is still no shortage of new things to learn, working in […]
Reading, Writing & Coding
Computer programs and books share the property of having a dual nature. A book is both something tangible and intangible: a physical object that has to be packed up in a box when you move, and at the same time a story, a biography, a point of view. You can’t judge a book by its […]
Why Lisp is More Than Lists
There is no shortage of Lisp rants on the internet, sometimes entertaining, sometimes educational and sometimes both. In this post I’d like to dip my toes into those waters and offer my own mini-rant, centered on one particular idea about Lisp that is often repeated, usually in introductions to the language, which strikes me as […]