Viewing profile — reikonomusha

Packaging software for Linux users is a nightmare. Unless - your program is extraordinarily simple - you can manage to statically link libc - you can ship (or statically link) all …

The problem is that the intersection between your business's interests and the interests of the small pool of available developers is usually very small. Building banking apps? Wel…

Haskell is typically terse in addition to expressive. So "tight" seems more apt. Lisp is traditionally not so terse, but still expressive.

For a brief period of time over 60 years ago, yes. :)

What evolution in particular do you think? The developers use it for commercial products in quantum computing and defense [1]. That doesn't mean it's done in some complete language…

For all practical purposes, the syntax of Lisp isn't just a cosmetic choice, though.

I've noticed this more recently on HN. Either the top comment has to be some negative sentiment even if seemingly good-faith, or a comment on something completely tangential (like …

What you say is entirely true in theory. An editor can have whatever it wants. Anything is possible—but somebody needs to do the work. If your favorite code editor is Zed, chances …

"It should be easy enough for" sets a UX bar, not a target audience. Kind of like the English phrase "X is so easy that even a toddler could do it," regardless of whether such a st…

For historical interest, Lem did used to advertise itself as a Common Lisp development tool specifically, but that has changed relatively recently (past year?). From my distant van…

Something like SLIME isn't essential to execute Lisp code, you're right, but it is essential in order to understand the efficiencies afforded by interactive development, which may …

Coalton is also a full-featured embedded language of Lisp that is sufficiently paradigmatically different than run-of-the-mill Lisp code you'd see in a Common Lisp textbook, since …

Not that I've seen.

It is not known, and the model problem for this is Hilbert's 13th [1]. Nonetheless, "elementary function" is a technical term dating back to the 19th century; it's very much not a …

You can calculate, measure, draw, construct, write a power series for, express as hypergeometric function, etc. the Bring radical too. All of these concepts, from sine to real numb…

The Bring radical has a great geometric interpretation: BR(a) is where the curve x^5 + x + a crosses the x axis. Like sine or exp, it also has a nice series representation: sum(k =…

Not a typo! Think of f(x) = x as a seed function that can be used to build other functions. It's one way to avoid talking about "variables" as a "data type" and just keep everythin…

To be fair to Spivak, he did say it was comprehensive introduction. :)

EML can represent the real absolute value, so long as we agree with the original author's proviso that we define log(0) and exp(-∞), by way of sqrt(x^2) as f(x) = exp((1/2)log x). …

This fundamental "cheat" gave rise to some of the most important pure and applied mathematics known. Can't solve the differential equation x^2 - a = 0? Why not just introduce a fun…

You are correct, it is undecidable by Richardson's theorem [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richardson%27s_theorem

Arnold (as reported by Goldmakher [1]) does prove the unsolvability of the quintic in finite terms of arithmetic and single-valued continuous functions (which does not include the …