Viewing profile — jgw

An auspicious occasion for a dot-com era classic: $ whois zombo.com | grep Creation Creation Date: 1999-10-10T10:57:47Z

"I see what you did there," as they say elsewhere on the Internet. Nifty little device to make a an important point.

I was told that the inventor came up with the idea while at the theatre with his wife. As the spotlights converged on a performer, the idea sprung to mind, and he yelped "I've got …

I don't think any discussion of "misguided promotional offers" is complete without a mention of Hoover's "free flight" fiasco: * http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3704669.stm Wor…

Clever and artful, with a little nostalgia thrown in. 1993 was the year I started my undergrad and would not see a "web browser" until the following year. It's nice to re-capture a…

Indeed it is - Fahlman worked with Steel et. al. on Common Lisp. Other notable folks I recognized in the thread: * Dave Touretzky - author of a well-regarded Lisp textbook in its d…

Of course, Fahlman is a Lisper, so of course he's going to use parens... ;)

It makes me a bit of a luddite (and a heck of a curmudgeon), but it always makes me a little sad when good ol' ASCII smileys are rendered all fancy-like. There's something charming…

See first 25 entries or so in the permuted CL symbol index: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/CLHS/Front/X_Per... Scheme does use ?, and you can in CL if you really want.…

I really like: "A bad arrangement is better than a process." I might surreptitiously slip that into the next coding style guide I come across.

Re: "owe nothing to it", I respectfully disagree. Canadians at Waterloo enjoy a heavily subsidized world-class education, at the tax-payer's expense, then leave to contribute nothi…

No, I don't think you're seeing the proposed attack here. As I understand it: 1. A company tapes out their chip to be fabbed, as most chips are, off-shore. The design is clean. 2. …

Do you know if they run on 6502s and other Western chips of the time? Were they cloned, or imported? Or were there Soviet ISA's? I remember reading years ago about how Russian comp…

I think that's true. I think I'd formulate it more broadly as, "In our interaction, I'm vaguely aware that there's some sort of subtext that I don't understand, but is very importa…

Bit late replying to this, so I hope you see it, but as I noted elsewhere, the key here is something called a "reader macro". This is a mechanism by which you can control the behav…

Interesting! I'm wide open to more Scheme in my life - so thanks for the pointers.

Programmable syntax (reader macros), programmable printer are 2 big ones. Also regular macros are key, manipulating code as structures not text, having both lexical and dynamic var…

Haven't spent enough time with Racket, but my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that you won't squeeze as much performance out of it, and performance is quite important. I…

Sure, s/built/are building/g. Without going into too much detail, I basically am subsuming another language (statically-typed, Algol-ish) wholesale into Common Lisp. It replaces th…

I enjoyed skimming over this again -- I happen to be the guy who wrote the first comment on it. I'm pleased to say that I've stuck with CL, and I'm glad I did. I've managed to use …

I was hoping "What Art Is" would be salvageable, but sadly not. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/6/19/143553/870 I don't even recall who wrote it now, but I've had it bookmarked …

It did to me, too. It has some of the mood of my all-time favourite piece of Interactive Fiction - heck, of any fiction. Photopia ( http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html ) It's my h…

Here's a very nice Common Lisp quickref for anyone else who might be into it: http://clqr.boundp.org/

It's pretty much how modern ASICs are reverse-engineered today - mainly for patent infringement investigation.